Scottish Art News Issue 16

A R T SCOTTISH ART NEWS

ISSUE 16 AUTUMN 2011 £3

F. C. B. CADELL: THE SCOTTISH COLOURIST JOHN BURNINGHAM: AN ILLUSTRATED JOURNEY LEGACY: A RODDY BUCHANAN PROJECT EDINBURGH ART FESTIVAL BRITISH ART SHOW 7

HELEN CHO CANADA

ZHANG QING CHINA

TIM ELLIS UK

JOLANTA REJS POLAND

MIA WEN–HSUAN LIU TAIWAN

MARK SALINAS AMERICA

Old Master Paintings: Bridging the Atlantic

RESIDENCY PERIOD 15 JUNE – 1 NOVEMBER

ARTISTS AT GLENFIDDICH 2011

CIRCLE OF ABRAHAM JANSZ STORCK (DUTCH 1644-1708) SHIPS IN A MEDITERRANEAN PORT To be offered 7th Oct at Freeman’s Price on application

Lyon & Turnbull, Scotland’s oldest auctioneer, and long-time partner Freeman’s of Philadelphia, the oldest auction house in the United States, are launching their inaugural Old Master Fine Art auction this autumn.

This unique collaboration provides unrivalled access to buyers in Europe and America, and will capitalise on the strong international market for high quality fine art from the 16th-18th centuries.

To discuss selling with Lyon & Turnbull and Freeman’s please contact Nick Curnow on 0131 557 8844 or email nick.curnow@lyonandturnbull.com

SRIKANTH KOLARI INDIA

JJ VALAYA INDIA

EDINBURGH

THE GLENFIDDICH DISTILLERY Dufftown, Banffshire AB55 4DH SCOTLAND

Tel: (+44)1340 820000 Email: andy.fairgrieve@wgrant.com Web: www.glenfiddich.com

GL A SGOW

LONDON

PHIL ADELPHIA

BOSTON

CHARLOT TE SVILLE

The two-part sale will be held on 29th September at Lyon & Turnbull, 33 Broughton Place, Edinburgh and on October 7th at Freeman’s Saleroom at 1808 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.

For sale details, viewing times and fully illustrated catalogues please visit www.lyonandturnbull.com Scottish Art News 2

CADELL EXHIBITION

8 – 30 SEPTEMBER

8 BENNET STREET, LONDON, SW1A 1RP – 0207 493 1888

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PORTLAND GALLERY www.portlandgallery.com - emily@portlandgallery.com

Scottish Art News 4

CONTENTS The Fleming Collection

Scottish Art News

8 John Burningham: An Illustrated Journey

24 Scottish Art News round-up 26 Karla Black: Scotland +Venice 2011

A retrospective exhibition at The Fleming Collection celebrates the rich and varied career of one of Britain’s most distinguished and best-loved illustrators including illustrations and working drawings for his children and adult books as well as those for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming. by Selina Skipwith

14 The Scottish Summer Exhibition

A range of works by contemporary Scottish artists are on sale this summer in The Scottish Summer Exhibition at The Fleming Collection for which an invited group of established and emerging artists working in a variety of mediums have submitted works. by Helen Dyson

26 In Focus: Will Maclean, Bard McIntyre’s Box, 1984

Following the recent Will Maclean 2011 retrospective at The Fleming Collection, Emma Baker looks in more depth at a key work by the artist.

For the 54th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale Karla Black will present a solo exhibition of new abstract sculptures.

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Legacy: A Roddy Buchanan Project A new work by artist Roddy Buchanan in response to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, their legacy and recent social, political and economic change is on show at the Imperial War Museum. by Emma Baker

34 F. C. B. Cadell: The Scottish Colourist

In the autumn of 2011 the National Galleries of Scotland will begin its Scottish Colourists Series with an exhibition of the work of F. C. B. Cadell. It is the first retrospective exhibition of his work mounted at a public gallery in almost 70 years. by Selina Skipwith

38 Edinburgh Art Festival:

This year’s Art Festival will showcase major solo exhibitions and new work by leading international artists alongside emerging talent. Exhibitions will take place in 42 museums, non-profit, commercial and artist-run spaces throughout the city and include an exhibition of new work

by David Mach across five floors of the City Art Centre exploring the themes and legacy of the King James Bible in the year of its 400th anniversary.

41 Elizabeth Blackadder

A landmark exhibition spanning six decades of the career of Elizabeth Blackadder, beginning with her work in the 1950s and culminating in her most recent paintings, will open at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.

by Marion Amblard

44 Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture Elizabeth Blackadder Interior, Kyoto, View of a Garden, 1991 Oil on canvas, 122x122 cm Private collection

Karla Black, Installation view, Modern Art Oxford, 2009 Image courtesy the artist, Mary Mary, Glasgow, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Modern Art Oxford Photo: Andy Keate

This summer Bourne Fine Art in Edinburgh are holding an exhibition tracing the history of Scottish portraiture.

by Duncan Macmillan

Regulars 48 Art Market Round-up by Will Bennett 50 Books 56 Review Childish Things, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

58 Preview 2011 British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, Glasgow The Pre-Raphaelites: Scottish Connections & Collections, Dundee

Scottish Art 1650-2010: work from the city’s collection, Edinburgh

64 Listings 66 The Fleming Collection News and Exhibitions 70 Events

The Fleming Collection is widely recognised as the finest collection of Scottish Art in private hands and was originally conceived as a corporate collection in 1968 for Robert Fleming Holdings Ltd in the City of London. Since 2000 the collection has belonged to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation which aims to promote Scottish Art to a wider audience. The collection consists of works by many of Scotland’s most prominent artists, from 1770 to the present day, including works by early nineteenth century artists, the Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists, the Edinburgh School and many contemporary Scottish names. The Fleming Collection holds regular exhibitions drawn from the Collection as well as loans from public and private collections of Scottish art which can be viewed in the specially designed gallery free of charge. Selected works from the Permanent Collection are displayed in the new first floor gallery which opened to the public in June 2011.

The Fleming Collection | 13 Berkeley Street | London | W1J 8DU tel: +44 (0) 20 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com | gallery@flemingcollection.com Opening Hours: Tues – Sat 10am–5.30pm Admission Free

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Scottish Art News 6

EDITOR’S NOTE

THESCOT TISHGALLERY

To subscribe to Scottish Art News please complete the subscription form on p.72 of

CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE 1842

this magazine. Alternatively, contact The Fleming Collection.

This autumn issue of Scottish Art News looks ahead to the coming

T: 0207 042 5730 E: admin@scottishartnews.co.uk, or complete

months, highlighting exhibitions opening around the UK between

a subscription form online at

now and January 2012. Exhibitions in focus include a number of

www.flemingcollection.com/scottishartnews.php

shows opening in Edinburgh over the Edinburgh Art Festival, from a

Scottish Art News is published biannually by

five-century survey of Scottish portraiture to a five-storey exhibition

The Fleming Collection, London. Publication dates: January and June.

2 - 30 July Post-War Scottish Masters Katie Horsman

spaces involved in the festival throughout the city and beyond – a

To advertise and/or list in Scottish Art News please contact:

5 August - 3 September Elizabeth Blackadder

mixture of not-for-profit, commercial and artist-run spaces showing a

Briony Anderson | T: 020 7042 5713

diversity of artwork across a range of contexts.

E: briony.anderson@flemingcollection.com

Forthcoming Painting Exhibitions 2011

of new work by artist David Mach. There are as many as 42 art

7 September - 1 October JD Fergusson David Cass Calum McClure

Summer at the Scottish National Gallery opens with

Elizabeth Blackadder and the first of their Scottish Colourists

Behind Scottish Art News at The Fleming Collection:

exhibitions, F. C. B. Cadell. At the Imperial War Museum in London,

Editor: Briony Anderson

Emma Baker looks in detail at a new artwork by Glasgow-based

Interns: Emma Baker, Helen Dyson

artist Roddy Buchanan which addresses The Troubles in Northern

Additional contribution: James Greer

5 - 29 October FCB Cadell Pat Douthwaite Kate Downie

Ireland – a highly topical project both in light of recent events

2 - 30 November Stephanie Dees

there and in the steps being taken by the Scottish Government to introduce new laws to curb the sectarian violence that has been

Revised design concept by Flit (London) and Briony Anderson

marring Scottish football.

Printed by Empress Litho Limited

3 - 24 December Gallery Artists

In an extended books section, Bill Hare and Alan Shipway

write from personal perspectives on two recent publications, related

THESCOTTISHGALLERY 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6HZ Mon - Fri 10am - 6pm, Sat 10am - 4pm www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

projects and exhibitions, opening up new avenues of enquiry for further enagagement.

MADE IN LONDON BY FLIT

The seventh edition of the Hayward’s touring British Art

FLITLONDON.CO.UK

Show is being staged at three venues across Glasgow this summer and features nine Scottish artists, an acknowledgment by the show’s London-based curators that Scotland is a significant force in the

Scottish Art News Issue 16 is kindly sponsored by:

contemporary art scene. One of the artists, Karla Black, presents at this year’s Venice Biennale as well as being nominated for the Turner Prize, along with Scottish artist Martin Creed. For Francis McKee, director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow (one of three venues staging British Art Show 7), the main difference between this

© Scottish Art News 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

incarnation and that of 1990 when the British Art Show last toured to

copied or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the

Glasgow, is that artists no longer feel that they have to leave for London.

publisher. Scottish Art News accepts no responsibility for loss or damage of unsolicited

material submitted for publication. Scottish Art News is published by The Fleming Collection

These sentiments are echoed in a recent publication by

Craig Richardson which traces (in the main) positive changes and

but is not the voice of the gallery or The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

developments in artistic and curatorial practice in Scotland since 1960, citing ‘outspoken critical independence’ as one of the keys

All images copyright of the artist or artist’s estate unless otherwise stated.

to the country’s continuing vitality in visual art. And as the British its ‘A History of the World in a 100 Objects’ (the new Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway won the online poll) we learn that over 20 million people downloaded podcasts of the series (broadcast on Radio 4) demonstrating the importance of museums and their

Cover Image

Museum takes the 2011 Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries for Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937)

Carnations

objects which can take us into histories that may be unfamiliar.

Oil on canvas

© The Fleming-Wyfold Art

I wish to thank all the contributors and advertisers in this

Scotland’s Islands Festival 2011 – London Exhibition:

Scotland’s oldest established auction house, for their continued

Bringing the beauty and spirit of Scotland’s Islands to London through Scotland’s most exciting artists: John Lowrie Morrison (Jolomo); Mike Healey; Robert Kelsey; Jamie Hageman; Vega; Alan Anderson; Erni Upton; Willie Fulton; Fiona Macrae; and sculptors Laurence Broderick and Mhairi Corr. Orkney chairs; Iona Silver and Harris tweed will be on display

support and generous sponsorship that has made this magazine

Exhibition 25 September – 1 October, 2011, at The Air Gallery, 32 Dover Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4 NE

possible. (Briony Anderson)

Paintings will be available for sale and full exhibition will be on line at www.caledoniart.com from 13th September 2011

edition of Scottish Art News and in particular Lyon and Turnbull,

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Foundation

For info or catalogue contact: amanda@caledoniart.com 07718 516954

Scottish Art News 8

John Burningham An Illustrated Journey A retrospective exhibition at The Fleming Collection celebrates the rich and varied career of one of Britain’s most distinguished and best-loved illustrators including illustrations and working drawings for his children and adult books as well as those for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming.

Curated by Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art

J

Mr Gumpy’s outing by John Burningham (1970)

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ohn Mackintosh Burningham was born in 1936 in Farnham, Surrey. His parents had avant garde ideas about education and he attended a total of nine schools, from Wynstones, a Rudolf Steiner school near Gloucester, to Naemoor, a boarding school near Dunfermline, and from the age of thirteen, A.S. Neill’s school Summerhill. Summerhill was an alternative school where lessons were not compulsory and was to a certain extent governed by the pupils who made up the rules at weekly school meetings. Burningham benefited from having a good art teacher, Henry Herring, who made sure his pupils had plenty of bold colours, large sheets of paper and brushes and encouraged them to just get on with it.

Burningham remembers spending ‘huge amounts of time in the art room because I could choose to do that, possibly at the expense of other subjects. I was drawing all the time.’ He left Summerhill in 1953 with a School Certificate in English Literature having failed the art exam and other subjects.

On leaving school Burningham registered as a Conscientious Objector, rather than doing National Service, to please his pacifist father. He did two and a half years Alternative Military Service working at a variety of jobs including slum-clearance in Govan, working for the Forestry Commission in Sussex, school building in Calabria and working for the American Quakers in Israel.

On his return to London in 1956, Burningham enrolled on a three-year course in graphic design and illustration at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. There his tutors included Keith Vaughan, Bernard Nevill and Laurence Scarfe. It was at Central that he met Helen Oxenbury who was studying theatre design. They married in 1964 and it was only when Scottish Art News 10

Burningham remembers that the only change that Ian Fleming made to his illustrations when he saw them was to ask for the addition of a striped Tabac sign to be added to a drawing of Paris. Fleming, like his character James Bond, was a keen smoker!

they had small children that Oxenbury changed career to illustrating children’s books so she could work from home.

Burningham’s first break came when he was commissioned by Harold Hutchinson, the publicity director of London Transport to design a poster for them. The first, Please avoid the rush hour, was printed in 1961 and eight further posters followed. To coincide with the exhibition at The Fleming Collection, The London Transport Museum is displaying all nine posters alongside related commissions Burningham received from the nationalised British Transport Commission on behalf of its subsidiary bus and coach companies, such as Thames Valley, Royal Blue and West Yorkshire, together with ‘stock’ posters designed for

wider regional distribution.

Burningham’s first attempt at writing and illustrating a children’s book was Borka: The Adventures of a Goose With No Feathers in 1963. Tom Maschler, at Jonathan Cape, agreed to publish the book and it was awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. Burningham never looked back and is still inventing and illustrating stories to the delight of readers of all ages.

Through the success of Borka, Burningham was asked by his publishers to illustrate a children’s story by Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and grandson of Robert Fleming, founder of Flemings bank. The book was originally published in three volumes brought out separately and Burningham found illustrating someone else’s story a simpler process than illustrating his own. This commission allowed him the space to concentrate on drawing the characters and to work out how he could make the car fly on the page the way it does in the story. Burningham made his own model of Chitty and suspended it from the ceiling on fishing line and then took photos of it from every angle.

The remnants of the model along with a number of the original working drawings are on display in the exhibition.

Burningham remembers that the only change that Ian

Burningham made his own model of Chitty and suspended it from the ceiling on fishing line and then took photos of it from every angle

ABOVE Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (model hanging from the ceiling by John Burningham) OPPOSITE FROM TOP Chitty Chitty Bang Bang model, Glasgow Sketchbooks

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Scottish Art News 12

FLEMINGS

Fleming made to his illustrations when he saw them was to ask for the addition of a striped Tabac sign to be added to a drawing of Paris. Fleming, like his character James Bond, was a keen smoker!

Burningham won the Kate Greenaway Medal for a second time in 1970 with Mr Gumpy’s Outing. His success continued through numerous titles for both Cape and Walker, and he is regarded as one of the world’s most talented picture-book makers. Though Burningham is now best known for the many children’s books he has written and illustrated, this exhibition also explores the work of his varied freelance career which has included working on an animated puppet film in the Middle East, designing covers for the RIBA Journal, murals, exhibition models, magazine illustrations and advertisements. Much of the archival material is on show for the first time and visitors of all ages will enjoy the chance to see first hand the varied work and diversity of style of this witty and perceptive artist.

MAY FA I R

Of course, I am immensely lucky to be producing books after all these years, but I don’t find the work any easier having done so many. When I start a new book, I think I am not going to be able to do it again. I can’t draw. I can’t use colour.

It’s rather a miserable process.

If you are a craftsman, once you have learned to lay bricks by and large you can get up in the morning and lay bricks. It’s more difficult to make colour, or words, or lines work. I have never understood it, and I probably never will.

So here I am embarking on another 32 pages and wondering how ever I am going to make them work.

(John Burningham by John Burningham, Jonathan Cape, London 2009; p.220)

Selina Skipwith is Keeper of Art at The Fleming Collection.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new book, John Burningham: An Illustrated Journey by John Burningham and published by The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation priced £19.95.

Pomifer Autumnus, posters for London Transport by John Burningham(1961-65)

John Burningham: An Illustrated Journey 13 September – 22 December 2011 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Tel: 020 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30pm Admission Free Burningham’s London Transport Posters 12 September – 2 December 2011 London Transport Museum Covent Garden Piazza London WC2E 7BB www.ltmuseum.co.uk Monday – Thursday, Saturday and Sunday 10am–6pm / Friday 11am–6pm

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Scottish Art News 14

SCOTTISH SUMMER EXHIBITION Following on from last year’s successful inaugural selling exhibition, a select group of established and emerging artists working in a variety of mediums have submitted works to go on sale in The Fleming Collection this summer

‘S

upporting Scottish contemporary art is a very important part of what we do,’ says Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art at The Fleming Collection. ‘Not only do we buy works for our own holdings but we also aim to promote the wealth of talent that exists in Scotland.’ The title of the show echoes that of the Summer Exhibition held at the nearby Royal Academy, although artists submit work to the latter while The Fleming Collection’s show is by invitation only.

The artists exhibiting include Professor Bill Scott, President of the Royal Scottish Academy and Chairman of the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Scott trained at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) in the 1950s and afterwards at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. After a brief period of teaching in Fife, in 1961 he returned to Edinburgh where he taught at ECA and eventually became Head of Sculpture from 1990 until 1997. As a sculptor Scott often works on a small scale and uses a wide variety of materials including wood, marble, bronze, plaster and ceramic. Scott’s three small sculptures on display contrast with the work of Alexander Allan. Allan studied sculpture at ECA, and has submitted to the exhibition two wall-hung works and an imposing, large scale granite sculpture, Flambé.

Figurative painting is explored in very different ways in this year’s exhibition by artists such as Adam Kennedy, a young Glasgow-based artist who won the 2011 Aspect Prize for Scottish contemporary art (hosted at The Fleming Collection in January); Jackie Anderson’s fragile images, portraits that catch their subjects unawares, her near transparent washes of paint recording people passing by lost in their own thoughts; and Derrick Guild, who has won many awards for his paintings which reference European still lifes from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This year, The Fleming Collection has invited Edinburgh Printmakers to showcase their work and The Scottish Summer 15

ABOVE Paul Furneaux, Untitled–Yellow, 2010 Mokuhanga print in edition of 20, 30x60 cm Derek Guild, Chocolate on Turtle, 2008 Oil on Linen, 25x20 cm OPPOSITE Delia Baillie, Field, 2009 Oil, acrylic & photo-collage on board, 59.5x39.5 cm

Scottish Art News 16

Fine art by fine printers

THE ROYAL GLASGOW INSTITUTE OF THE FINE ARTS

ABOVE Andrew Mackenzie, Quarry Edge 5, 2011, oil on panel, 103x180 cm BELOW Jackie Anderson, Bus window reflection 4, 2010, oil on cotton on board, 73x53 cm

Exhibition includes a selection of limited edition fine art original prints by contemporary artists commissioned and published by Edinburgh Printmakers. Established in 1967 as the first open access studio in Britain, Edinburgh Printmakers is dedicated to the promotion of contemporary printmaking practice and provides a creative space where artists have access to printmaking facilities enabling them to experiment and produce work independently. As well as the studios there is also a gallery space at the premises in Union Street with a changing exhibition programme. Paul Furneaux, one of The Fleming Collection’s invited artists in this year’s Summer Exhibition currently has an exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers exploring the theme of landscape through the Japanese woodblock printing technique Mokuhanga. Andrew Mackenzie’s work is included within the Printmakers showcase as well as three large recent oil paintings in which plants and trees reclaim quarry sites, the man made and the natural world irrevocably entangled, a theme which Mackenzie is fascinated with.

A percentage of all sales from The Scottish Summer Exhibition go towards supporting The FlemingWyfold Art Foundation, the charity that runs The Fleming Collection, now regarded as an embassy for Scottish art in London.

The Scottish Summer Exhibition 2011 invited artists are: Alexander Allan, Jackie Anderson, Delia Baillie, Andrew Cranston, Graham Fagan, Helen Flockhart, Paul Furneaux, Derrick Guild, Louise Higgins, Ian Howard, Mark I’Anson, Adam Kennedy, Henry Kondracki, Paul Macgee, Lorna McIntosh, Andrew Mackenzie, Janice McNab, Jo Milne, Bill Scott, Kate Whiteford.

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150th Open Annual Exhibition Paintings, Sculpture etc

www.empresslitho.com

The Mitchell North Street Glasgow G3 7DN 23 OCTOBER – 12 NOVEMBER 2011 Prizes in many categories including best first time exhibitor

RECEIVING DAYS – 28 & 29 SEPTEMBER 2011

---------------------------------------Please send RGI Exhibition schedule and labels to: Edinburgh Printmakers artists showcased: Chad McCail, Kirsty Whiten, Norman Shaw, Ed Summerton, Chad McCail, Scott Myles, Graeme Todd, Kenny Hunter, Chris Orr, Ray Richardson, Andrew Mackenzie.

Edinburgh Printmakers Studio and Gallery The Scottish Summer Exhibition 23 Union Street 10 June – 3 September 2011 Edinburgh EH1 3LR The Fleming Collection www.edinburgh13 Berkeley Street, London printmakers.co.uk Helen Dyson is exhibition coordinator of The Scottish Summer Exhibition 2011.

W1J 8DU Tel: 020 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30pm Admission Free

Name ....................................................................

Address.................................................................... .................................................................................

The Scottish Sale Part II

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to include Four Scottish Colourists Auction Wednesday 31 August, 6pm Edinburgh Enquiries Chris Brickley + 44 (0) 131 240 2297 chris.brickley@bonhams.com www.bonhams.com/scottishpictures

Illustrated: Samuel John Peploe, RSA (British, 1871-1935) Flowers and fruit Estimate: £300,000 - £500,000

RGI, 5 Oswald Street, Glasgow G1 4QR Tel: 0141 248 7411 Fax: 0141 221 0417 Email: art@royalglasgowinstitute.org www.royalglasgowinstitute.org Charity No: SC014650

Schedules cannot be downloaded from website Scottish Art News 18

IN FOCUS

Emma Baker focuses on a work by Will Maclean following his 2011 retrospective at The Fleming Collection

A

fter a recent retrospective at The Fleming Collection and an exhibition of new work at Art First, the art of Will Maclean perhaps deserves some reconsidering. Duncan Macmillan’s The Art of Will Maclean: Symbols of Survival expertly traces Maclean’s practice from his formative years growing up in Inverness, charting his work up to 2002.1 The overwhelming sense that emanates from Macmillan’s reading of Maclean’s work is a melancholic and calm serenity, a mournful musing on the loss of Gaelic culture and highland fishing communities entering into the hypermodernised late twentieth century. This is something particularly noted by Michael Glover in his recent review of Maclean’s retrospective for The Independent. Glover describes the exhibition’s atmosphere as akin to a ‘funeral procession’ that simultaneously affects a simulacrum of North Sea spray emitted by the beach-combed driftwood objects that comprise Maclean’s construction boxes.2

Indeed, this is what Maclean’s work is celebrated for; the sensitive lamentation conveyed by his often beautiful reliquary-like object assemblies fabricates a pseudo-voodoo mythological archaeology that taps into highland history.

Through invoking memories of his own childhood and connections to the lost Gaelic traditions and faded highland maritime culture, Maclean’s works act as votive offerings and memorials to people, objects, and traditions for which 19

none would usually be afforded. Maclean’s combination of tender and often personal nostalgia with an engagement in craft and museological display, implore the solemn attention of the viewer whose awareness is constantly alerted to the overwhelming sense of loss that is the mainstay of Maclean’s visual language. A deep melancholy tied to a fading collective memory is thus at the heart of Maclean’s practice. However one work in Maclean’s oeuvre that has been the subject of a special amount of attention, in part for its dialogue with the Bardic Gaelic poetry of the Highlands, but also owing to its peculiar and relative aggressiveness within the artist’s production, is the 1984 work owned by the National Galleries of Scotland, Bard McIntyre’s Box.

Brought up in the 1940s as the son of a harbourmaster from the fishing-crofting community of Polbain in Coigach, Will Maclean was of the first generation denied a direct connection to the traditions and language native to his family heritage. Maclean’s father, John Maclean, was of the last to natively speak Gaelic as a first language within a largely self-sufficient fishing community. John Maclean learned English as a second language at school and took to a life at sea, eventually becoming master mariner in charge of the harbour at Inverness. Eager to follow in his father’s footsteps, Maclean initiated a shortlived maritime career at the age of fifteen on board the HMS Conway, having to pursue another pathway after failing an eye test.

Will Maclean, Bard McIntyre’s Box, 1984 Mixed media, 61x46x7 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Scottish Art News 20

Will Maclean’s studio. Courtesy the artist

Going on to study in Aberdeen, graduating from Grays School of Art in 1965, Maclean looked to a career as an artist. Denied access to tradition via language as well as early career aspirations, Maclean’s artistic practice has long been anchored by an attachment to loss, both personal and collective. Through his work Maclean not only taps into his own family history but encompasses the greater concerns of the Gaelic poets, especially those emanating from the aftermath of the Highland Clearances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In his essay ‘Will Maclean: An Artist of the Gàidhealtach’, Murdo Macdonald situates Bard McIntyre’s Box as significant for Maclean’s collaboration with the Gaelic poetry of highland culture.3 Certainly, Maclean’s friendship and thematic parallelism with the late Gaelic poet Sorely MacLean highlights the centrality of loss for both artists’ work. And yet, as Macdonald has identified, ‘where Sorley’s poetry recognises the threat to Gaelic, Will Maclean’s art is driven by an awareness of his own loss of the language.’4 This loss usually translates in Maclean’s work 21

For Bard McIntyre’s Box the highland concerns are present but conversely underscored by the hysterical and somewhat violent imagery taken from the original poem of the artwork’s derivation

as a melancholic and fragmented allusion to past traditions tied to maritime themes or island life, however for Bard McIntyre’s Box highland concerns are present but conversely underscored by the hysterical and somewhat violent imagery taken from the original poem of the artwork’s derivation.

Sourced from the Book of the Dean of Lismore and written by the sixteenth-century Bard McIntyre (not to be mistaken for the eighteenth-century Gaelic lyricist Duncan Bàn Macintyre), the poem entitled The Ship of Women acts as the

Will Maclean Window Visitation North Uist 1980, carved and painted wood 104x46x18 cm Inverness Museum and Art Gallery Photo: Ewen Weatherspoon

Scottish Art News 22

reference point for this peculiar work: What ship is this on Loch Inch, or can it be reported?

What has brought the ship on the loch?...

An old ship without anchors, without oak timber; we have not known its like; she is all one ship of leather: she is not a ship complete for sea-going.

Evident in the appropriation of flotsam and found ephemera utilised for the construction boxes, visual expression is constructed from a language-inpieces – meaning is fragmented, elusive and abstracted

What is yon crew in the black ship pulling her among the waves? – A crew without fellowship, without sense, a woman band of mind disordered.

A band loud-voiced and talkative, loquacious, chanting, negligent; flighty, quarrelsome, greedy, ravenous, evil, of ill desires.

A party thick-rumped and lascivious is that around the two sides of Lock Inch; they have all been cast into the ship on the chill ridge of the sea.

This metaphorical silencing is explicitly referred to in Window Visitation North Uist from 1980 – the presence of a carved head rendered blind and mute by wooden butterflies exemplifies the detachment of language precipitated by an overarching sense of tradition lost. There is a fundamental sadness within this work that distinguishes it from the threatening hysteria of Bard McIntyre’s Box, aligning it with the melancholy more readily associated with Maclean’s work. Interestingly for Maclean’s work, within classic psychoanalytical thought, hysteria and melancholia are interconnected – both are symptomatic of a psychic internalisation of loss that in turn affects a distorted relationship to language. By broaching Bard McIntyre’s Box as a starting point, the possibility of a dual negotiation between hysteria/melancholia becomes a potentially revealing inquiry into a collective psychic response to the effects of waning Gaelic language and culture in Will Maclean’s art from the late twentieth century.

Emma Baker has just completed an internship at The Fleming Collection.

A good woman would not venture into the Ship…5 Breaking the usual elegiac lamentation familiar to Maclean’s work, Bard McIntyre’s Box calls to mind the threat and seduction of anarchic femininity evoked in McIntyre’s poem. Against a black background, three female forms are displayed as aggressive and sexualised. The central figure exposes a grotesquely enlarged and castrative vagina formed from two seal’s teeth; literally the vagina dentata that weds fear with desire associated with cautionary tales from folk mythology.6 Indeed, these threatening and monstrous female forms are more readily symptomatic of the psychoanalytical concept of hysteria first constructed in the late nineteenth century by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.

Originated as a pathologically effeminate disorder of the emotions, hysteria became known as the disease of women, identifiable as a female-gender specific excess of emotion and aggressive sexuality combined with attention seeking behaviour. Convinced of the importance of art and visual aids for the study of this malaise, Charcot documented countless photographs of women suffering from hysterical symptoms; vulgarised by such images of disturbed women, hysteria was realised as a concept through such visualisations. Nonetheless, recognised as a product of the patriarchal socio-political moment and later dispersed under the guise of countless psychological disorders, hysteria ceased to be recognised by modern medical authorities.

However, this does not discount the value of hysteria as a psychic phenomenon useful for investigating art in conversation with a lost tradition or way of life. Essentially 23

hysteria can be understood as an emasculating and castrative force, rendering impotent that which it threatens.

In terms of Bard McIntyre’s Box and in the context of Maclean’s oeuvre as a whole, the three monstrous women can be seen as an allusion to endangered and threatened identity and tradition. McIntyre’s sixteenth-century poem acts as vehicle that not only invokes Maclean’s affinity with Gaelic poetry, but which stands for the extinction of an entire people and way of life as a result of the Highland Clearances and Scottish Diaspora during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, the more recent decline of crofting and fishing communities against the onset of modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century reinforces a sense of historical trauma attached to an elimination of highland culture. In Freud’s later development of hysteria after Charcot, he identified the hysterical symptom as a defensive substitute-formation – a sexual and libidinal masquerade – aimed at preventing the reactivation of trauma through association.7 Thus Maclean’s hysterical women simultaneously act as harbingers and deflectors of the decay of highland tradition, particularly in relation to language.

Dislocated from the language of his father’s

A new publication was produced to accompany the 2011 Will Maclean retrospective exhibition at The Fleming Collection. Will Maclean: Collected Works 1970-2010 includes essays by Murdo Macdonald and Duncan Macmillan as well as a discussion between the artist and Sandy Moffat. It is available from The Fleming Collection priced £12.95.

mother tongue, there is a certain verbal gagging prevalent in Maclean’s work. According to Lacan, ‘when pushed beyond the limits of their control of language and affect, any person... may be hystericized.’8 Evident in the appropriation of flotsam and found ephemera utilised for the construction boxes, visual expression is constructed from a languagein-pieces – meaning is fragmented, elusive and abstracted.

after the Terror (New Haven and London 1999), pp. 19-20.

E N G AGE WI TH ARTI S TS, C U RATO RS AN D MUS EUM D I RECTO RS AT S PECI AL G ATHERI NGS

1. Duncan Macmillan, The Art of Will Maclean: Symbols of Survival (Edinburgh 2002).

2. Michael Glover, ‘Review: Will Maclean Collected Works 1970-2010’, The Independent, Friday, 18 March 2011.

For our current programme of events please contact:

3. Murdo Macdonald, ‘Will Maclean: An Artist of the Gàidhealtachd’, in Will Maclean Collected Works 1970-2010, exh. cat., The Fleming Collection

Lucia Lindsay

(London 2011), pp. 9-15.

Deputy Keeper of Art/Patrons Office

4. Ibid., p. 12.

5. William J. Watson (ed.), Bàrdachd Albannach: Scottish verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1937), pp. 218-223.

6. See Duncan Macmillan, The Art of Will Maclean: Symbols of Survival, p. 69.

7. For a conflation of hysteria, visual culture and historical trauma see Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s study of Jacques-Louis David’s post-revolutionary production, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David

8. As quoted by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan. ‘Hysteria,’ in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Elizabeth Wright (ed.) (London 1992),

The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair London W1J 8DU T: 020 7042 5735 E: gallery@flemingcollection.com W: www.flemingcollection.com

p. 165. In addition to this, it is interesting to consider Freud’s famous case study of ‘Dora’ from 1905 – as a patient diagnosed with hysteria, among her other symptoms Dora suffered from ‘aphoria’ or loss of voice. See On Sexuality: three essays on the theory of sexuality; and other works (Harmondsworth 1977).

Scottish Art News 24

SCOTTISH ART NEWS ROUND-UP

the artists participating in their 2011 residency programme. Artists from China, Poland, Canada, the UK, Taiwan, India and the USA will be based for three months at the distillery. In Aberdeenshire, Scottish Sculpture Workshop commences its residency programme after a major refurbishment and Glasgow-based artist Ross Sinclair is among the artists participating in Deveron Arts’ Residency programme in Huntly. www.covepark.org / www.glenfiddich.co.uk / www.deveron-arts.com / www.ssw.org.uk

In collaboration with Creative Scotland, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has announced the first appointments to the Artists’ Fellowship Programme, an award which aims to give artists unique access to the Galleries’ world-class collection, archives and library, to research new working methods and ideas. This year’s fellowships have been awarded to Glasgow-based sculptor Nick Evans, and the collaborative partnership of Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth. www.creativescotland.com Karla Black There Can Be No Arguments, 2010 Polythene, plaster powder, powder paint, thread Courtesy the artist and The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Photo: Gautier Deblonde

Exhibition installation has begun in the rejuvenated Scottish Portrait Gallery (SNPG) in Edinburgh. The Gallery will reopen to the public on 30 November 2011, revealing the dramatic changes

Two Glasgow-based sculptors have been nominated for this year’s

the tapestry studio’s achievements over the past 100 years. The

that have transformed the Gallery in the two years since it closed

prestigious Turner Prize. Karla Black, who is presenting work for

exhibition will chart the ambitions and changing values of tapestry

for renovation in April 2009. The £17.6 m project, the first major

Scotland + Venice at the Venice Biennale this year, and Martin Boyce

in this modern period through the example of this world leader

refurbishment in the Gallery’s 120-year history, has restored much

(who has been nominated for his solo exhibition at Galerie Eva

in the field. Dovecot has worked with a range of both British and

of the architect’s original vision of the building, clearing away an

Presenhuber, Zurich, which built upon his No Reflections exhibition

American artists including Eduardo Paolozzi, David Hockney, Robert

accumulation of twentieth-century interventions, and increasing

at the 2009 Venice Biennale) have been nominated along with

Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, Harold Cohen,

the public and exhibition space by more than 60 per cent. Among

painter George Shaw and film artist Hilary Lloyd. The winning

Frank Stella and Tom Phillips – all represented in this show by major

the 17 opening displays will be Citizens of the World: David Hume

artist will be announced in December this year and The Turner

tapestries and designs. For guest-curator Dr Elizabeth Cumming,

& Allan Ramsay, which will take as its focus two pivotal figures

Prize exhibition will be at the BALTIC from 21 October 2011 until 8

a leading historian of Scottish art and design, the exhibition offers

of the Enlightenment, David Hume and Allan Ramsay, as well as

January 2012 (only the second time that the Turner Prize will have

the opportunity to explore the extraordinary power and unique

showcasing some of the greatest eighteenth-century works in the

travelled outside London in its near-30 year history). Black was

qualities of modern tapestry – ‘At its best, Dovecot’s sure knowledge

NGS collections as well as some exceptional loans. Other displays

nominated for her solo show at Galerie Capitain Petzel, Berlin, and

base allows creative experimentation. This means that Dovecot’s

include The Age of Improvement, in which two of the nation’s best-

for contributions to various group exhibitions. Black’s innovative

weavings match tradition with imaginative working, whether

loved portraits will be on display – Nasmyth’s iconic 1787 portrayal of

sculptural installations often combine traditional art-making

interpreting Arts and Crafts design, Neo-Romanticism imagery or

the young Robert Burns and Raeburn’s 1822 depiction of Sir Walter

materials like paper, paint, plaster and glass with less traditional

the sheer freedom of Abstract Expressionism.’

Scott at the height of his career. Another display, Migration Stories:

materials such as medicines, packaging, clothing, carpets, foodstuffs,

www.dovecotstudios.com

Pakistan (ongoing series) will highlight Scotland’s impact on the

toiletries and make-up. Boyce’s work relates to and transforms the

A doctoral research project on the artists who worked with Dovecot’s

world, exploring questions of Scottish identity and encompassing

space around it, creating atmospheric, sculptural art inspired by

weavers, funded by the AHRC in collaboration with the University

issues of place, belonging, exile and tradition. In the Contemporary

modernist design history, which it often directly quotes. The body

of Edinburgh, is being undertaken by former Fleming Collection

Gallery a specially commissioned video installation The Missing

of work which started out in Venice’s Palazzo Pisani was a series

employee, Francesca Baseby. More information on this research can

by Scottish artist Graham Fagen will inaugurate the contemporary

of atmospheric tableaux, which included rusty tables, fallen leaves,

be found at http://writingwarpandweft.blogspot.com.

programme. The SNPG is collaborating on this project with The

discarded benches and upturned dustbins.

National Theatre of Scotland which will stage Andrew O’Hagan’s

www.scotlandandvenice.com

adaptation of his acclaimed 1995 novel The Missing, described as ‘an As summer begins residency programmes commence across

unsettling tale of those that slip unnoticed under society’s waves’.

Scotland. At Cove Park, visual arts residencies have been awarded to

www.nationalgalleries.org

2012 will see Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, celebrate its centenary

Glasgow-based visual artist and filmmaker Henry Coombes, London-

with an exhibition Dovecot Studios: Contemporary Tapestry

based artist Alison Turnbull and London/Brussels-based artist Chris

since 1912, a major publication and a series of events celebrating

Evans. In Speyside Glenfiddich Whisky Distillery have announced

25

FROM TOP Alexander (Sandy) Moffat Poets’ Pub (Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Sidney Goodsir Smith, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch, Alan Bold and John A. Tonge) 1980 Oil on canvas: 183x 244 cm. Scottish National Portrait Gallery Milton Rogovin, Scottish Miners, Scottish National Portrait Gallery © Milton Rogovin 1982. Courtesy the Rogovin Collection, LLC Visualisation of the exhibition Blazing with Crimson: Tartan Portraits

Scottish Art News 26

K A R L A B L A C K Scotland + Venice 2011 at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale

ABOVE Karla Black, Capitain Petzel, Berlin 2010. Installation view. Photograph: Nick Ash OPPOSITE Karla Black, Brains Really Are Everything , 2010, soil, paint, glue, plaster powder, powder paint, soap Courtesy the artist and The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Photo: Gautier Deblonde

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This year Scotland + Venice will present the work of Glasgowbased artist Karla Black. Curated by the Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh), Black’s solo exhibition of new abstract sculptures will fill the fifteenth-century Venetian Palazzo Pisani.

Using familiar domestic materials such as powders, pastes, oils, creams and gels (and usually in large quantities), Black’s process-based sculptural pieces attempt to offer a sense of visceral absorption in the material world. And while not entirely site-specific, her work is made with its physical and conceptual context in mind – the materials intimately and painstakingly worked into sculptural forms in situ by the artist. The results are less object-based in any traditional historical sense, having instead more in common with the antiform works of Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson. With further reference to the work of Hesse, Black has talked about the way in which her work is rooted in feminism and its impact on the visual arts, primarily in its questioning of conventions of practice and interpretation.

Black’s sculptures can be vast, particularly in more recent work. On this scale, the pieces themselves – floor works and hanging sculptures – become ‘expanses’ to be negotiated as much as looked upon. Furthermore, in their detachment from fine art conventions of longevity, these are temporary constructions, vulnerable to damage or destruction. The natural fragility inherent in some of the materials she uses reflect her fascination with psychological vulnerability. Yet any sense of fragility in her works is often negated through its authoritative command of the space.

Despite the many decisions made by Black during the process of working the materials into their sculptural forms, there is a degree to which the material takes its own form. Just as a painting can develop new directions through the paint bringing unexpected results, so too can the materials in Black’s works create unintended or unexpected results. In a recent exhibition of her work at Inverleith House in Edinburgh (2010), this was succinctly illustrated in Better, a tiny pool of a brittle substance forming a delicate pink rosette-like form on the gallery floor, which was in fact a dried-up puddle of trademarked antacids, Gaviscon Advance and Gaviscon Original. Although carefully positioned and considered within its context, this piece speaks of the accidental, of experiment, and demonstrates the way in which the simplest gesture can bear the most rewarding, engaging results.

Interestingly, in the same exhibition, Black chose to hang paintings of Scottish lochs and mountains by the late Bet Low alongside her sculptures. Black has discussed her work’s association with landscape, and with this in mind, one could also draw reference to the floor works of Richard Long in which earth, stones, mud and clay are brought into the gallery space and configured by the artist into large-scale wall and floorworks – their simplicity and economy of means evolving

their own repertoire of gestural marks, movement and phsyical presence.

This will be the fifth presentation from Scotland + Venice, a partnership between Creative Scotland, British Council Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland. It builds on the critical success of previous projects which have featured artists including Turner Prize winner Simon Starling and Turner Prize nominees Cathy Wilkes, Jim Lambie and Lucy Skaer, and last year presented the first solo exhibition for Scotland at the Venice Biennale with the work of Martin Boyce.

Karla Black was born in Alexandria, Scotland, in 1972. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and continues to live and work in Glasgow. Her work has been shown in major museum and commercial gallery exhibitions in the UK and abroad. She is represented by Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and her work is held in museum collections including Tate, London; migros museum für gegenwartskunst Zürich; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Arts Council Collection, England.

Current and forthcoming group exhibitions include: British Art Show 7, Hayward Gallery, London (until 17 April), then touring to various venues, Glasgow (27 May – 21 August 2011); Watercolour, Tate Britain, London (until 21 August); Structure & Material, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (31 March – 26 June); and Essential Art, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (opens May 2011).

Karla Black: Scotland + Venice 2011 At the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 4 June – 27 November 2011 Vernissage: 1-2-3 June Palazzo Pisani (S.Marina), Calle de le Erbe, 6103 Cannaregio, Venice email: info@scotlandandvenice.com www.scotlandandvenice.com

Scottish Art News 28

LEGACY A RODDY BUCHANAN PROJECT

Legacy: A Roddy Buchanan Project, 2011 Installation view: Imperial War Museum Courtesy the artist and IWM

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Scottish Art News 30

T

he media cycle surrounding the Omagh car bombing in Northern Ireland and news of sectarian letter bomb threats in Glasgow indicates an apparent resurgence of Republican/ Loyalist violence as prevalent on the UK’s political barometer. The accountability of PC Ronan Kerr’s death to the action of Republican insurgents, in combination with the violent threats and recent attack on Celtic manager Neil Lennon, sets a somewhat contentious context for Roddy Buchanan’s latest exhibition. Commissioned for the Imperial War Museum in London, Buchanan’s new work appositely presents a response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Symbolically the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 marked the end of the Troubles and the beginning of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. The recent reports of violent activity challenge the general public’s perception of a struggle that had supposedly been consigned to the history books – an attitude largely adopted by the London-based UK press until very recently. Buchanan very much deals with the conflict as it has been since Bloody Sunday; his work presents an honest and sensitive response to a violence that has not only affected Ireland, but has also greatly impacted on the rest of the UK, particularly Glasgow.

Entitled Legacy, this exhibition presents a dialogue that not only implicates the Irish Republican/Loyalist/ Catholic/Protestant struggle, but pivots on Scotland’s relationship to a conflict more commonly considered the domain of Northern Ireland. In partnership with two Glasgow flute bands, one Republican and one Loyalist – the Parkhead Republican Flute Band formed in 1978 and Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum formed in 1981 – Buchanan portrays the untold story of pride, mutuality, support, and sympathy shared between Northern Ireland and Glasgow in the wake of Bloody Sunday.

Born and based in Glasgow, Buchanan’s practice is very much rooted in identity politics, particularly those of being Glaswegian. Essentially a portraitist, communal allegiance and loyalty are explored as constitutive of identity. ‘Clannish in outlook’ by his own admission, the performativity of ‘creed, clan and country’ via participation in group activity or by belonging to a community is innately important to Buchanan, informing his art to date.1 Informal games, more specifically football, have played a vital role for Buchanan, with the antagonism between the Old Firm football clubs, Celtic and Rangers, offering a space through which community identity and deep-rooted prejudices, namely the Loyalist and Republican conflict, are often violently enacted.

The strong ties between Glasgow and Ireland and the shared antagonism between Protestant and Catholic factions are the historical by-product of a continuous 31

migration between both countries. The industrialisation of Scotland in tandem with the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852 precipitated an exponential increase in Irish, and thereby Catholic, diaspora in Scotland during the nineteenth century. Similarly, prefaced by the colonisation of Ulster, a large number of natively Protestant Scottish immigrants populated Northern Ireland during the seventeenth century.

Thus, historically there is an entrenched entanglement of both countries in the Republican and Unionist conflict – the most visible outlet of which is in Glasgow, evident in the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers football clubs.

Buchanan’s interest in nationality and allegiance as demonstrated by community and team activity stems very much from growing up in a town where what football team you support and who you call family, is regarded with great importance and pride.

This topic was broached by Buchanan in the 2002 video work Love/Hate/Celtic/Rangers. Old Firm tribal loyalty was herein deployed as an entry point into a wider discussion of sectarian conflict. Short video clips of Glaswegian school children spouting one word answers to ‘What team do you love? What team do you hate?’ very simply pinpoints the controversial and challenging theme that mushroomed to become the subject of Buchanan’s 2007 exhibition at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Histrionics. The sectarian divide was again tackled in this multifaceted body of work. Looking to blur the boundaries between the two factions, the exhibition acted as an expanded self-portrait for Buchanan who employed his own family’s genealogies as a point of departure to approach the sensitive themes at the exhibition’s heart. Covering hundreds of years, Buchanan’s genealogical investigations for Histrionics revealed that his family had not ventured far from the area of Glasgow he still lives in today. Buchanan’s inquiry stems not from some anthropological impulse but is instead anchored by a will to explore his own roots, calling upon his own position as an insider to approach the bipolarity at the core of Glaswegian identity.

Created in 2006, the double portrait of Buchanan and his wife, fellow artist Jacqueline Donachie, entitled Glasgow’s Glasgow represents the artist’s first direct intervention into this sensitive subject. Pictured wearing t-shirts bearing the slogan ‘mixed marriage’, Buchanan draws focus on himself and his own family in order to approach the wider prejudices that simultaneously divide and comprise everyday life in Glasgow. The inter-marital Catholic and Protestant alliance between Buchanan and Donachie, not an uncommon phenomenon itself, signifies a levelling of the conflict on an immediate level – Buchanan himself embodies bipolar Glasgow. But Buchanan is not interested in offering all-encompassing solutions; his work does not

FROM TOP The Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum The Parkhead Republican Flute Band Images courtesy the artist

Scottish Art News 32

guilelessly hint at an end to conflict, but rather looks to acknowledge the importance of pride, tradition and heritage, honestly presenting the facts as a means to instigate discussion and dialogue.

Glasgow’s Glasgow marks the beginning of a long trustgaining process of approaching both the Republican Parkhead Flute Band and the Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum. With their cooperation, Buchanan produced the dual-channelled film Here I Am as the centre piece of Histrionics. Laying the groundwork for Legacy at the IWM, family connections were utilised to build a working relationship with the flute bands and any reluctance to participate Buchanan attributes to a suspicion of publicity after some previous ill treatment by the press. After negotiations, Buchanan filmed each band playing and preparing to play on separate occasions, but for the exhibition screened them together, edited and synchronised so that one band plays while the other patiently waits. This work represents an impossible phenomenon but highlights the right of each to demonstrate peacefully as a proud expression of heritage and clan – no one interrupts the other, each has an equal voice that while opposing, can be seen as interchangeable. Again Buchanan looks to level out conflict without offering resolution. As a working-class phenomenon associated with the violence of sectarianism, flute bands have become an unwelcome presence in the city of Glasgow. However, Buchanan’s empathic engagement with individuals or social groups demonstrating pride for their community and heritage is evident via a deep respect for the complexities of what the flute bands represent, a sympathy borne out of the artist’s own Glaswegian roots. The structural inclusion of a partition wall dividing the screening of each film is symbolic of this respect as well as serving a functional purpose – one is able to choose which side they watch.

In Legacy, the centrepiece film Scots/Irish Irish/Scots takes its cue from Histrionics and builds on the relations formed for Here I Am. The same flute bands were approached and filmed performing in marching season, but in relation to the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Republican flute band were filmed marching in Derry, while the Loyalists marched in Scotland. This highlights the traditionally strong bond of support between Scotland and Ireland in the Republican/ Unionist conflict, a war Scotland has historically always supported nationally as well as financially. It is a known fact that Scotland raised more money than any other country, including Ireland itself, to help fund the Easter Rising of 1916, while the number of Orange order members in Scotland far outstrips those in Ireland presently. This mutuality of support is also a factor in the relationships shared between the flute bands in both Scotland and Ireland, especially during the Troubles when bandsmen from Scotland would regularly travel to Ireland in support of the major parades, and in return Ireland would reciprocate. Brought together once again and in the same format for Legacy, the two new films are screened simultaneously in the gallery space at the IWM.

As a continuation from Histrionics, the two films are once again divided by the structural inclusion of a partition wall. A structural feature that in this context takes on a heightened immediacy via 33

the direct allusion to the peace lines demarcating the Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland, a phenomenon that has not died down since the Good Friday Agreement. Conversely, the number of walls in Northern Ireland has actually increased since the Troubles ended, with more going up only to separate the houses of Protestant and Catholic neighbours. The wall acts as a sign that the hatred has not died down, and is as much for the Republican and Loyalist viewer than it is to signify the perpetuated conflict and separation. For Buchanan the role of the flute bands does not represent a problem but rather offers a solution.

Publically sanctioned, although not wholly welcomed, the flute bands provide a means of channelling pride and loyalty without cause for violence. Although Glasgow council is keen to shut them down, the number of people joining Republican/Loyalist flute bands has substantially risen in recent years. What the bands afford is the opportunity to publically celebrate heritage; the sense of community and discipline imparted by performance transcends written or spoken words for these men.

Marching communicates the need to demonstrate and to be seen and heard. This is something Buchanan has looked to do for each side – both Loyalists and Republicans share an equal presence in this exhibition. The photographic portraits of the individual band members and group photographs are equally weighted in terms of size and physical wall space – where the Republican band have the largest group shot, the Loyalist band members have the larger individual portraits and vice versa. It should be remembered that these organisations do not exist in parallel harmony but rather, as Buchanan explains, ‘perpendicular’ to the other.

Strong feeling and contention subsists between both parties, with regulations put in place to ensure the two do not encroach upon each other – hence why Buchanan was unable to film the two bands together for Histrionics. What their cooperation and involvement represents is a desire, especially from the older members of the bands, to start communicating publically about family members lost in the name of the conflict shared between Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Buchanan’s engagement with the Troubles comes from a specifically Scottish point of view, a response that reveals the Irish/Scots entanglement as inherent within Glasgow’s collective identity. Legacy is testament to and a reflection of Buchanan’s own personality, a project impossible without his nuanced and respectful understanding of both communities. In providing equal exposure to both bands representative of a large community in Scotland and more widely of the greater UK, Buchanan locates an equivalence founded in difference. Through

ABOVE A member of the Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum marching OPPOSITE FROM TOP Christie Gallagher, Parkhead Republican Flute Band Ian McAdam, Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum Images courtesy the artist

Legacy, pride for heritage and identity supersede the conflict associated with Republicanism and Loyalism.

Emma Baker has just completed an internship at The Fleming Collection.

1. ‘In Conversation’, in Sean McGlashan, Histrionics: Roddy Buchanan, exh. cat., Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow 2007, p. 6.

Legacy: A Roddy Buchanan Project Until 7 August 2011 Imperial War Museum Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ Tel: 020 7416 5320 www.iwm.org.uk Open: daily 10am–6pm Admission Free

Scottish Art News 34

F. C. B. CADELL: THE SCOTTISH COLOURIST The National Galleries of Scotland begin its Scottish Colourists Series with an exhibition of the work of F. C. B. Cadell

A

major retrospective of Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (18831937) renowned for his stylish portrayals of Edinburgh New Town interiors and the elegant society that occupied them, his vibrantly coloured, daringly simplified still lifes of the 1920s and for his evocative landscapes of the west of Scotland and the south of France, goes on show in Edinburgh.

This autumn the work of F.C.B. Cadell, one of the four artists popularly known as ‘The Scottish Colourists’ is re-examined in a long overdue retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two (formerly called the Dean Gallery). The last solo exhibition of the artist held in a public gallery was mounted by the National Gallery of Scotland in 1942, five year’s after Cadell’s death.

Cadell was the youngest of the Colourists. Born in Edinburgh, the son of a doctor, Cadell’s family took a keen interest in the arts and encouraged their son in his career as a painter. Cadell studied art in Edinburgh, before going to Paris in 1899, accompanied by his mother and sister. It was the noted watercolourist Arthur Melville, a close friend of Cadell’s father, who suggested that Cadell would benefit from a training in Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. His early success was in watercolour, having a work exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon when he was only sixteen. Cadell lived in Munich from 1906 until 1908 before returning to Edinburgh. A trip to Venice in 1910 proved a turning-point and from then until the First World War, Cadell experimented with colour and technique and his paintings were often characterised by lively impressionistic brushwork.

All his life Cadell strove to make painting look easy, wanting to make it appear the product of a gentleman rather than a professional artist. He admired Whistler for this achievement writing ‘he had what some great painters have – a certain ‘amateurishness’ which I rather like…’.

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937) The White Villa, Cassis, 1924, oil on panel © The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

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In 1909 Cadell moved to a new studio at 130 George Street, Edinburgh. This move had been made possible partly with the income that Cadell had received from his first exhibition at Doig Wilson & Wheatley in 1908, where he sold thirty paintings, and also from the small legacy that he received from his father who had died in 1909.

All his life Cadell strove to make painting look easy, wanting to make it appear the product of a gentleman rather than a professional artist. He admired Whistler for this achievement writing ‘he had what some great painters have – a certain ‘amateurishness’ which I rather like…’.

Scottish Art News 36

Cadell was not a rich man, like the other three Colourists he was dependent upon the sale of his paintings for a living, and this undoubtedly had some bearing on his choice of subject matter. As well as his fashionable portraits of Edinburgh hostesses in their New Town houses, Cadell painted a number of beautiful domestic still lifes.

The fluidity of brushstroke and heightened colour he had developed in his Venice works was now adapted to great effect in his Edinburgh interiors. Not on loan to Edinburgh but currently on display in The Fleming Collection’s new first floor gallery for the permanent collection is Carnations which is particularly characteristic of Cadell’s painting of the period depicting a still life arrangement into which the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn by the placement of a black fan painted in the foreground. Hanging on the wall Cadell has included one of his own paintings, possibly one of his Iona landscapes. The painting is very similar in composition to an earlier work White Peonies and Black Fan purchased by his friend and patron Patrick Ford from his exhibition at Aitken Dott in 1909. This exhibition was not a commercial success and Cadell, with his outgoing personality and social contacts found that it was easier to sell work privately. Cadell was by far the most gregarious of his fellow Scottish Colourists, and his wit and charm meant that he was in constant demand on the Edinburgh social circuit.

In 1912 he discovered the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland with its rapidly changing light, returning almost every year to paint. In 1915 he enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Scots, 9 Battalion and by the end of the year was serving in the trenches in France. In 1918 he was transferred to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 8 Battalion as a Second Lieutenant. It was to Iona that Cadell headed after his discharge from the army in 1919, the island offered him a sanctuary and he resumed his painting. The demand for his glamorous pre-war interiors and portraits had dried up and instead it was the calm restful views of Iona that found a market.

The retrospective exhibition in Edinburgh, curated

by Alice Strang, will consist of approximately 70 paintings, from public and private collections, some of which have rarely, if ever, been exhibited before. A range of the still life objects depicted in his paintings, including jugs, bowls and vases, will be on display alongside archival material such as one of Cadell’s painting smocks, letters and photographs.

The Fleming Collection is loaning two oils from its permanent collection The White Villa, Cassis and The Dunara Castle at Iona.

Cadell visited Cassis, a small port and resort just east of Marseilles, in 1923 and again (with Peploe) in 1924, the year in which works by all four Colourists were exhibited together in Paris for the first time, at the Galerie 37

Barbazanges. By this time Cadell had developed a highly refined sense of colour with white often playing a major role both indoors and outside. The works he produced while in Cassis with Peploe are strong, semi-abstracted views of the town and harbour in which form and shadows are marked out equally in areas of flat colour.

The Dunara Castle at Iona dates from about 1929 and is typical of Cadell’s work of this period. The rapid plein-air painting techniques used by the artist for his views on Iona and Mull were easily adapted to his love of stylish handling of pigment and colour, many of these canvases being completed in a single sitting. Following his visits to Cassis Cadell’s palette altered increasingly using brilliant reds, blues and greens, applied, as here, in areas of brilliant, sometimes pure colour.

This painting originally belonged to Cadell’s friend and patron, the Edinburgh paper maker, J.J. Cowan.

To coincide with the retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two, the Portland Gallery, London and The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh are will also be holding exhibitions of Cadell’s works including private loans as well as works for sale. The Fleming Collection will be lending works to the Portland Gallery including The Feathered Hat and Roses.

The Feathered Hat, oil on millboard © The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

Selina Skipwith is Keeper of Art at The Fleming Collection.

FROM TOP The Dunara Castle at Iona, oil on millboard The Feathered Hat, oil on millboard Roses, watercolour on paper © The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

Scottish Colourists Series: F. C. B. Cadell 22 October 2011 – 18 March 2012 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two (formerly called the Dean Gallery) 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh Tel: 0131 624 6200 www.nationalgalleries.org Open: daily 10am–5pm Admission £8/£6 Cadell 8 September – 30 September 2011 Portland Gallery 8 Bennet Street, London SW1 Tel: 020 7493 1888 www.portlandgallery.com F. C. B. Cadell: Paintings and Works on Paper 5 October – 29 October 2011 The Scottish Gallery 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 Tel: 0131 558 1200 www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

F.C.B. Cadell: The Life and Works of a Scottish Colourist 1883-1937 Tom Hewlett and Duncan Macmillan with a Foreword by Timothy Clifford Originally published in 1988, F.C.B. Cadell: The Life and Works of a Scottish Colourist 1883-1937 was the the first book devoted entirely to the life of the remarkable artist F.C.B. Cadell. Now fully revised, this expanded edition includes an essay by Duncan Macmillan which complements the biographical details presented in Tom Hewlett’s original text.

Published September 2011, Hardback £35.

Scottish Art News 38

OPPOSITE David Mach, The Plague of Frogs, collage Completed 2011, 16ftx8ft. Photo: Richard Riddick BELOW FROM LEFT Martin Creed, Work No.1059 (Scotsman Steps) 2011 Visualisations courtesy Haworth Tompkins Architects Robert Rauschenberg, Le Coon Glut, 1986 Assembled metal parts, 161.3x200.7x17.8 cm © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York

This year’s Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) kicks off on the 4th August and is set to showcase a programme of exhibitions by leading international artists alongside emerging talent.

Major exhibitions will take place in 42 museums, non-profit, commercial and artist-run spaces throughout Edinburgh’s city centre and beyond.

A series of diverse and innovative events will accompany the programme, including the return of Art Late, EAF’s programme of late night openings and events, as well as a varied programme of workshops, talks and educational events throughout the Festival.

39

Four exhibitions by leading British sculptors open for the Festival – Anish Kapoor in Edinburgh College of Art’s Sculpture Court, David Mach at City Art Centre (further details follow), Tony Cragg at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Thomas Houseago’s outdoor exhibition of sculptures at the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Solo exhibitions by leading international artists include American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg at Inverleith House; American artist Ingrid Calame’s exhibition of drawings and paintings at The Fruitmarket Gallery (her first solo exhibition in Scotland); and German artist Anton Henning’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) at Talbot Rice Gallery. At Collective, Vienna-based artist Hans Schabus will display the rubbish accumulated by the artist and his family during one calendar year – cleaned, categorised and displayed along the walls of the gallery.

Additional highlights include an exhibition of paintings, drawings, etchings and linocuts by John Byrne at Open Eye Gallery, Elizabeth Blackadder’s major retrospective show at the Scottish National Gallery and an exhibition of Blackadder’s new paintings at The Scottish

Gallery (further details follow). Two newly-commissioned Expo-funded public artworks will also be in place – Martin Creed’s permanent installation on the Scotsman Steps, and a Temporary Pavilion in St Andrew Square Gardens, designed by Karen Forbes. Creed’s Work 1059, commissioned

by The Fruitmarket Gallery for the EAF involves Creed cladding in a different colour of marble each of the 104 historic steps which lead from the Scotsman Hotel on North Bridge to Waverley Station and The Fruitmarket Gallery on Market Street.

Forbes’s temporary structure will be designed to reflect a contemporary expression of the city’s long fascination with optics and optical devices for viewing. At the heart of the city where Sir David Brewster invented the kaleidoscope and dedicated a life to exploring the physics of light, Forbes’ glass chamber will use the latest technology in glass façade engineering to create a space which will celebrate the play of light and shadow.

The Queen’s Gallery will show The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein and the Scottish National Gallery, The Queen: Art and Image. Bourne Fine Art will show 5 Centuries of Portraiture (further details follow). An outstanding collection of work in glass will be on display at the newly reopening National Museum of Scotland.

Further afield, Jupiter Artland will host a gallery exhibition looking at the practice of renowned landform artist, philosopher and architect Charles Jencks, which marks the completion of Jencks’ monumental Cells of Life landform at the sculpture garden.

Scottish Art News 40

ELIZABETH BLACKADDER A major survey of the career of Elizabeth Blackadder opens at the Scottish National Gallery

Precious Light: a contemporary celebration of the King James Bible by David Mach 30 July – 16 October 2011 City Art Centre, 2 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DE Tel: 0131 529 3993 www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk Precious Light, a five-storey exhibition of sculpture by David Mach including the artist’s working studio opens in July at the City Art Centre (his largest solo show to date). Over three years in the making, the exhibition explores the themes and legacy of the King James Bible in the year of its 400th anniversary through a contemporary imagining of the bible in collage, sculpture and words.

The exhibition will feature over forty of Mach’s trademark collages and large-scale sculptures composed of thousands of mass-produced objects such as coat hangers and match-heads. His intricate collages, cinematic in scale, use images sourced from magazines and other mass media to build complex composite pictures that combine the familiarity of popular culture with those of the biblical themes portrayed.

The artist will move his working studio from London to Edinburgh for the duration of the exhibition.

Relocated to an entire floor of City Art Centre, visitors will 41

T

be able to view the artist and his team as they create a vast decoupage depiction of the Last Supper.

A further floor will focus on the words and language of the King James Bible, with extracts from the Old and New Testaments lining the gallery walls, a display of early editions of the bible, and an audiovisual exploration of the text illustrating the countless words and phrases from the King James Bible that have entered contemporary language.

Also unveiled at the exhibition will be two of Mach’s distinctive match-head sculptures depicting Jesus and the Devil. Five times the size of a human head and built from thousands of coloured match-heads, one of the sculptures will be set alight in a performance by the artist.

Following a stabilisation process, the transformed charred head will be displayed in the exhibition.

he National Gallery of Scotland is celebrating the 80th birthday of Dame Elizabeth Blackadder with a retrospective exhibition devoted to her art and career.

Elizabeth Blackadder is among the most well-known contemporary Scottish artists and the first woman to be elected as a Royal Academician and Member of the Royal Scottish Academy. In 2001 she was honoured with the title Her Majesty the Queen’s Painter and Limner in Scotland, a role that began with Sir Henry Raeburn almost 200 years ago.

Born in Falkirk in 1931, Blackadder studied at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art. Her early work was shaped by her acquaintance with the Scottish painters William Gillies, William MacTaggart and Anne Redpath, whom she met through her studies. In the 1950s, following her studies, Blackadder began her career producing mainly landscape drawings and paintings with a limited palette inspired by her first trips to the continent.

such as David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin, Blackadder quickly saw the possibilities offered by the vibrant colour and dynamism of pop art and abstract expressionism. Her subsequent works injected new life into the Edinburgh School tradition of finding subject matter in the surrounding world. Paintings such as Flowers and a Red Table will fill the central room of the exhibition, revealing the energising effect these developments have had on her art.

From the 1970s, her garden and her cats have featured regularly in her still life paintings – Coco, the artist’s tortoiseshell cat, appears in many of her works. Blackadder has had a keen interest in botany from her childhood, but flowers only began to feature prominently in her paintings from the end of the 1970s. Her delicate paintings of flowers in watercolour on Japanese paper are among her bestknown works.

The exhibition displays her works chronologically,

For full details of the 2011 EAF programme, including talks, screenings, events and Art Late visit edinburghartfestival.com

Blackadder has travelled widely across Europe as well as in the United States and Japan, and these travels have had a major impact on her art. Not only has she been influenced by the places she visited, but she has also brought back from her travels an important collection of objects which have been used in the still lifes she has been painting since the 1960s. Like other artists of her generation

giving a good insight into her career while showing the evolution of her art. Using different media (oil painting, watercolour, drawing and different techniques of printmaking) her work explores landscape, still life and flower paintings and also, occasionally portraiture.

The exhibition examines some of the recurring themes in Blackadder’s work, focusing on her main sources of

ABOVE David Mach, Die Harder (detail), 2010, coat hanger sculpture Courtesy City Art Centre OPPOSITE FROM LEFT Elizabeth Blackadder Indian Still Life with Ball and Bird, 1974 Oil on canvas, 101x129 cm. Private collection Dark Pond, Alhambra, Granada, 1997, oil on canvas, 154x154 cm. Private collection

Scottish Art News 42

Elizabeth Blackadder in her studio (photographed November 2010)

Also showing during the Edinburgh Art Festival: Elizabeth Blackadder New Paintings 5 August – 3 September The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ Tel: 0131 558 1200 www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

Still Life with Iris, 2000, oil on canvas, 183x183 cm. Private collection

inspiration. For example, one room looks particularly at the influence of Japan and Japanese art on the artist.

Concluding with recent and new painting, drawing and printmaking, the exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Blackadder’s career, exploring the various influences which have informed her work while celebrating the richness and diversity of her artistic output.

For John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, Elizabeth Blackadder is ‘one of Scotland’s greatest painters. She has revitalised longestablished traditions of landscape, still life and flower painting in this country; she could be described as one of our finest painters in watercolour or equally lauded for her work as a printmaker. At once profoundly Scottish and enticingly exotic, her art is both familiar and mysterious.

This major exhibition is both a celebration of her work and an invitation to look again at the achievement of an artist who could be described as a “national treasure”’.

43

As part of a series of talks and events held along with the exhibition, the artist will discuss her life and career with curator Philip Long on 2 July.

Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Pierre Mendès France University in Grenoble and is a researcher in British studies.

She is a member of the French Society for Scottish Studies.

Elizabeth Blackadder 2 July 2011 – 2 January 2012 Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL Tel: 0131 624 6200 www.nationalgalleries.org Open: Daily 10am–5pm, Thursday 10am–7pm Admission £8/£6 A lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue Elizabeth Blackadder by Philip Long published by the National Galleries of Scotland will be available priced £14.95.

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder has been at the forefront of the Scottish art scene for over half a century. Her initial exhibition was at the 57 Gallery in 1959, her first at the Scottish Gallery followed just two years later in 1961. Now 50 years on, the principal summer exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery will be a retrospective of the artist and to coincide with this, The Scottish Gallery is hosting a major show of new paintings by the artist.

While the National Galleries are to honour Blackadder’s illustrious career, The Scottish Gallery is celebrating new and current work. From a recent visit to her Edinburgh studio it is evident that her new body of work has undergone no radical changes, but that her paintings continually evolve and develop to incorporate new inspirations. In her still lifes she explores, often playfully, the juxtaposition of colour, form and texture. The Japanese influence on her work once pronounced has become more subdued, her attention focused instead on the careful ordering of objects in space, each painting a carefully designed aesthetic scheme.

Also showing at The Scottish Gallery: Touching Gold 5 August – 3 September Jacqueline Mina is one of the UK’s leading goldsmiths and it is her ability to combine technical accomplishment with a painterly eye that has seen her international influence grow considerably in recent years. Winner of the acclaimed Jerwood Prize for Applied Art in 2000 she enjoyed a major retrospective at Goldsmiths in London at the start of 2011.

Touching Gold will give an insight into the mastery of Mina’s craft as well as providing a unique opportunity to see large body of her work together at one time.

Scottish Art News 44

FIVE CENTURIES OF SCOTTISH PORTRAITURE

David Allan (1744-1796) The Origin of Painting, oil on canvas, 69x48 cm 45

D

uring this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, Bourne Fine Art will present an exhibition of Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture, spanning the development of the genre from its courtly origins in the 1600s, through its Golden Age during the Scottish Enlightenment, via its reinvention as the fashionable art form of the day at the turn of the twentieth century, and culminating in an examination of the innovations the practice has undergone thereafter.

The first artist was a woman, or that is the story of the Origin of Painting as it is told in David Allan’s picture.

By the light of a single oil lamp a girl traces the outline of her lover’s shadow on the wall. Painted in Rome c.1775, Allan was adapting a story told by Pliny about the daughter of Dibutades, a Corinthian potter. Her lover was about to embark on a journey. To remember him, she drew the outline of his shadow on the wall. Her father then modelled it in clay and art was born. The avant garde artists in Rome in the circle of Gavin Hamilton to which David Allan belonged were fascinated by the idea of what art could have been like in its primitive, original and unspoiled state. Greek vases seemed to offer a model and in keeping with their style, Allan paints, not only her lover, but also the girl herself in profile. Neither image is in fact a portrait, but by placing it at art’s origin, the picture is nevertheless an epitome of the place of portraiture at the centre of the story of art since the Renaissance. If it was also especially important in Scotland, the reason was not simply the limitation placed on other kinds of patronage by the Reformation. It was because portraiture bears witness to the idea of the individual, central both to the Reformation and to the Enlightenment that followed it.

The earliest portraits here are those of the Earl of Wigton, John Fleming, and his wife Margaret. Dated 1625, they are attributed to Adam de Cologne. He was the son of Adrian Vanson, court painter to James VI, and as these sensitive and beautifully preserved portraits show, the outstanding painter in Scotland before George Jamesone.

In both pictures, the costume is beautifully rendered. She is dressed richly in dark velvet adorned with garnets and lace. His dark costume is embroidered with silver and he is wearing a coral earring. His style of beard and hair plainly declare his allegiance to Charles I and in the triple portrait

by Van Dyck, Charles I also wears a single earring.

Just over a century later, Allan Ramsay began a career which was to affirm the place of portraiture at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment. His portrait of the

Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) Portrait of the Countess of Strafford, oil on canvas, 74x61 cm

Adam de Colone fl.1595-1628 Portrait of Lady Margaret Livingstone, Second Countess of Wigton inscribed ‘Atatis SVAE 30’ and dated 1623, oil on canvas, 112x85 cm

Scottish Art News 46

Countess of Strafford dates from soon after he had settled in London in 1739. Nevertheless it is already possible to see in the lively characterisation the study of human nature that was to make Ramsay one of the greatest portrait painters of the age.

David Martin was Ramsay’s pupil and assistant in London. Later he returned to Scotland, however, and set up a successful practice. His portrait of Charles Kerr of Calderbank is likely to date from 1794 as, leaning on his musket, bayonet fixed, the sitter is proudly wearing the uniform of the Edinburgh Volunteers established that year.

With the sun breaking through cloud above the Firth of Forth behind him, this ambitious picture is among Martin’s most successful and undoubtedly he was stimulated by his rivalry with the young Raeburn whose dramatic style he emulates. The relationship was reciprocal, and Raeburn’s portrait of William Robertson which dates from soon after his return from Rome in 1786 equally shows the influence of Martin.

Raeburn’s style evolved rapidly thereafter. His portrait of Sir William Honeyman, painted a few years later, is darker and more solid, but his portrait of Alexander Munro painted c.1810, is one of the outstanding pictures in this collection. Boldly and broadly painted, the head stands out against the surrounding shadow with extraordinary solidity, a study at once in the physical properties of light and the psychological properties of vision; of the presence of an individual and how, when we see each other, we do not see detail, but deploy imagination; how sympathy is part of our social vision.

John Watson Gordon did not seek to rival Raeburn, but waited discreetly until after his death to set himself up as his successor. Although he is best known for rather dark and often somewhat grandiose portraits of men, the oval portrait of an unknown woman, dating perhaps from the early 1840s, 47

shows the delicacy of characterisation that marked his best portraits, particularly those of women.

In his later work, Watson Gordon was much influenced by portrait photography as it was pioneered

by D.O. Hill. It had an enormous impact, not only on the aesthetics of portraiture, but also crucially on its economics.

Portrait painting survived the competition, but only either as an art form of choice for the rich and fashionable, or from the artist’s personal interest in a sitter. The careers of both Harrington Mann and W.O. Hutchison reflect the former.

Both were successful society portrait painters and Mann’s picture of four children sitting on a high backed settle, all in their Sunday best, shows how good this kind of society painting could be. Hutchison’s portrait of his daughter Margery with her two sons, however, has an intimacy and immediacy that reflect its private character. The figures are closely grouped in an elegantly linked composition, but each of them is also absorbed in their own thoughts, and entirely at ease. William Gillies’s remarkable picture of Robert Scott Irvine is also a private picture. The sitter was a friend and fellow painter. Painted in 1925, the very beginning of Gillies’s career, the faceted structure of the face and jacket still reflect the cubism he had learnt in the studio of Andre L’Hôte in Paris. The sitter holding a cigarette between his fingers, seems lost in thought, but is vividly present to us, nevertheless. It is a very striking portrait indeed and fully worthy of the long tradition of Scottish painting in which it belongs.

Duncan Macmillan is Professor Emeritus, the University of Edinburgh, Art Critic of the Scotsman and author of several books on European and Scottish Art, including ‘The Art of Will Maclean: Symbols of Survival’ and ‘Scottish Art 1460-1990’.

Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture 29 July – 10 September 2011 BOURNE 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ Tel: 0131 557 4050 www.bournefineart.com

OPPOSITE FROM LEFT Sir Henry Raeburn, RA (1756-1823) Portrait of William Robertson c.1787-88, oil on canvas, 75x63 cm Sir Henry Raeburn, RA (1756-1823) Sir Alexander Munro Inscribed ‘Alexander Munro’ upper left, oil on canvas, 76x62 cm Sir William Gillies, RA RSA PRSW (1898-1973) Portrait of the artist Robert Scott Irvine, 1925, oil on canvas, 91x71 cm ABOVE Harrington Mann (1864-1937) A Family Portrait of Four Children 1915, oil on canvas, 160x132 cm

Scottish Art News 48

2011 Art Market Round-up ABOVE FROM LEFT Anne Redpath, OBE. RSA. ARA. LLD. ARWS. ROI. RBA. (1895-1965) Still life with Michaelmas Daisies, 43 x 52.8cm signed ‘Anne Redpath.’ (lower left), oil on panel £30,000-50,000. Sold for £134,400, Bonhams.

Provenance: A gift from the artist to the vendor’s father in 1937 This is a classic example of Redpath’s ‘white’ period, employing favoured motifs of the arc of table, crockery and cropped jug

F.C.B Cadell, RSA RSW (1883-1937) Iona looking to the Dutchman’s Cap Signed ‘FCB Cadell’ (lower right) Inscribed with owner’s details verso Oil on panel, 37.25x45 cm Hammer price: £65,000 Provenance: Purchased directly from Cadell on Iona by his friend David Munro Fraser, and by descent

Just three years ago Sotheby’s and Christie’s were staging specialist

of 20th Century British Art. ‘It was found that for clients it was better

Bonhams sale continued this trend when Children and chalked wall sold for

Blackadder’s Amaryllis and £11,050 for John Cunningham’s Still Life with

sales of Scottish art north of the border, producing fat catalogues

to offer pictures within other sales,’ said a Sotheby’s spokesman. You

£74,400 including commission. The hammer price of £62,000 was in the

Roses and a Fruit Bowl. The £8,500 hammer price for the latter was 183 per

full of works by the Colourists, the Glasgow Boys and Scottish

can’t argue with this logic. In an era when buyers of Scottish art come

middle of the £50,000 to £70,000 estimate and was second only to the

cent above estimate while the same artist’s Jug of Anemones fetched just

contemporary artists alongside eighteenth-century portraits and

from many different countries wider sales have much greater reach.

Cadell at the auction. Eardley’s popularity with buyers was reinforced by the

over £4,000, including commission, which exceeded its estimate by an

traditional highland scenes. The total raised by Sotheby’s auction of

fact that this Glasgow street scene had not been seen in public since it was

astonishing 288 per cent. With a third lesser work by Cunningham going

pictures at Gleneagles in August 2008 was almost £4.9 million with

where both Bonhams and Lyon & Turnbull continue to fly the flag

bought directly from the artist in the 1950s. Anne Redpath, another market

for 214 per cent above estimate, it was a strong showing for work by the

record prices for Francis Cadell and Joan Eardley.

for Scottish art. Bonhams held a sale of 107 lots on 21 April and was

favourite, had more mixed fortunes with Boats, Britanny selling for a modest

Scottish artist, who died in 2000. Overall 182 lots sold at Lyon & Turnbull

happy with the result. ‘This was our best result ever for a spring sale

£21,600 and Plants in the Sun, which had been won by its then owner in a

with 45 going above their high estimate.

difficulty of finding enough top of the range Scottish pictures and the

with over 80 per cent of pictures finding buyers,’ said a Bonhams

raffle in the 1950s and was estimated at £30,000 to £50,000, failing to

need for auction houses to cut their costs and to reach out to a wider

spokesman. Although there were no big money pictures in the

find a buyer. But four works by Alberto Morrocco all sold with two still lifes

valuable works being sold in Edinburgh and higher priced pictures going into

international audience has changed the way that the market works.

auction it had a solid feel with 38 lots, more than a third of the sale,

going above their estimates for £38,400 and £28,800 respectively.

more international sales in London. From now on the best will be separated

Christie’s abandoned Scottish sales in 2009 while Sotheby’s moved

selling above their high estimates. The appeal of Cadell’s pictures

from the rest.

its auctions to London. There the catalogues grew ever thinner until

of the island of Iona, which he visited every year, was demonstrated

War Art the day before the Bonhams auction. Although most of the 261 lots

such sales finally breathed their last in September last year when less

once again with Iona looking to the Dutchman’s Cap, estimated at

were Scottish, 22 were works from the collection of the investment bank

Will Bennett is the former Art Sales Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph who

than half the lots found buyers with the auction totalling under £1.5 million.

£40,000 to £60,000, fetching £78,000, the top price of the day. An

Lehman Brothers, the collapse of which triggered the global financial crisis.

now works for the marketing and public relations consultants Cawdell Douglas.

earlier Cadell, The Pink Robe dating from 1909, lacked the charm of the

Because of this the highest price of the sale was £18,750 paid for Picture

scrap its specialist auctions. Scottish pictures are now sold within

Iona painting but still performed respectably selling within its estimate

Made by Hand With the Assistance of Light by Walead Beshty, London-born

other categories with some going into the Victorian and Edwardian

for £72,000. Juan les Pins, by the Colourist George Leslie Hunter, fetched

and Los Angeles-based, which was once owned by the bank. Overall, 16

art sales. The Colourists, who latterly provided the only reason for

£19,200, an auction record for a work on paper by this artist.

of the former Lehman works went to new owners for a total of £52,000.

keeping specifically Scottish sales going, are now included in auctions

Among the Scottish artists, the highest prices were £12,060 for Elizabeth

Now all that is over because of the recession, and the

Sotheby’s has decided to follow Christie’s example and

49

This has not meant the end of auctions in Edinburgh

Eardley has commanded strong prices recently and the

Lyon & Turnbull held its sale of Scottish Contemporary & Post

The market for Scottish art is entering a new phase with less

Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley, RSA (1921-1963) Children and chalked wall signed ‘Joan Eardley’ (lower right) Mixed media on paper, 36x56 cm Hammer price: £62,000

Scottish Art News 50

Books streams of critical questioning located along the margins. Opening up

nature, Fulton is rare among land artists as he gives himself over to

George Henry and for his stunningly colourful, impasto paintings,

lines of inquiry with self-reflexive criticism, Zeiske and Sacramento

the land without changing or destroying the landscape.

which rank among the most decorative work that the Boys ever

appear to be constantly pushing themselves to consider various

produced. This comprehensive work by Bill Smith, an updated

interests and options, factors that change on a case-to-case basis and

an experience of geological time through the act of walking, breathing

reprint of the paperback edition first published in 1997, covers the

circumstances deeply rooted to the specificities of the place and its

in and out, taking step by step, exerting a line through the physicality

full trajectory of Hornel’s career as a painter and contains detailed

inhabitants.

of a human pace. Fulton attempts to break down the barriers between

biographical information, as well as thorough pictorial analysis.

Mountain Time Human Time attempts to formally reconcile

our mental and physical realms by reaching a holistic rhythm and

initiatives of Deveron Arts have been greatly understated. As a large

flow between walking and thinking. By initiating a temporary state of

Boys’ most innovative and daring work. Unusually they collaborated

share of the organisation’s funding comes from outside the arts with

euphoria between our internal rhythms and that of the outside world

on several artworks, most notably the 1890 painting The Druids,

an almost militant momentum, the book could be seen to overestimate

of nature, Fulton creates a potential line of experience that is unique

one of the group’s most iconic works. As close friends and artistic

the administrative resources and capabilities of a non-specialised

every single time. The book functions similarly – one can begin

collaborators, Hornel and Henry also travelled to Japan together in

readership.

reading at any given point, go forwards or back – with no linearity

1893, both lured by a fascination with the exotic east and seeking

One criticism that could be argued is that the funding

Together, Henry and Hornel created some of the Glasgow

ARTocracy: Art, Informal Space, and Social Consequence

distinguished.

artistic inspiration from a land so different to their own. The two men

A Curatorial Handbook in Collaborative Practice

ARTocracy aims to bridge the gap between the art world and the

stayed in the country for over a year, and the book explains the way in

Nuno Sacramento and Claudia Zeiske

everyday, a separation that many on both sides view with hesitancy. As

object is not stable. Rambling in tone, the attempted act of reading

which both artists’ style and choice of subject matter was influenced

Jovis Verlag GmbH 2010

a result the book is at its core an instructional handbook aimed more at

the book begins to resemble the amblings of a walk. Diverting from

by what they encountered on the trip.

Paperback £19.50

small towns than professionals in the art field. Nonetheless, it should

any single path to reach a final page and destination, each deviation

Largely written in plain language about a specialised field,

Mountain Time Human Time is an object, but this book

The journey facilitated one of the high points of Hornel’s

not be overlooked by contemporary art practioners and audiences as it

leads to a new experience and perspective on why one walks, and

career. After his return, he spent time preparing his Japanese

Since its inception 15 years ago in the town of Huntly, Aberdeenshire,

is a vital challenge to both the theory and praxis of transformative social

why one reads.

creations, and in 1895 a sell-out exhibition of his Japanese works was

Deveron Arts has become infamous for its adopted model, ‘The Town

actions that transcend the minute semantics of contemporary art today.

held at Alexander Reid’s Glasgow gallery. He received superb reviews,

is the Venue’. Curating their programme with a ‘locals-first’ approach,

(Amy Fung is the current arts writing fellow at Deveron Arts)

Commissioned by Deveron Arts, Mountain Time Human

Time carries forward the notion that our identities are infinitely

with critics ‘virtually unanimous in their praise.’

Deveron Arts’ Director Claudia Zeiske and former ‘Shadow Curator’

shaped by place and our understanding of how we engage with that

Nuno Sacramento splay open this socially-engaged approach and

place. Leaving no trace in the landscape, Fulton acknowledges that art

most of his Japanese works destroyed on the boat journey home, an

knowledge of collaborative curating in ARTocracy.

can never represent a place, only contribute a fragment to its history.

event which understandably left him distraught. The book recounts

The documentation and its carefully considered assemblage is all that

these events in detail, explaining how the mens’ contrasting fates

carefully-trimmed case study concerning the organic growth of a

tangibly remains for audiences, and at its best, the documentation

led to tensions that ultimately ended what had been one of the most

small venue-less arts organisation in the north east of rural Scotland.

can evoke and inspire rather than try and recapture an ephemeral

remarkable friendships within the Glasgow Boys group. Beyond the

ARTocracy leads readers from the town’s history, present population

moment. Fulton gives back to the land, bringing respect, awareness

Japoniste years, the book also traces Hornel’s later stylistic progress,

and industry statistics to theoretical essays on the idea of locality

and political context to the preservation of the wild.

as he turned his sights towards painting romanticised depictions of

by esteemed authors such as Lucy R. Lippard and Nina Möntmann.

(Amy Fung is the current arts writing fellow at Deveron Arts)

local children in pastoral settings. His remarkable legacy, in the form

Reading as a ‘how-to’ handbook, this book is also a

George Henry however suffered a contrasting fate, with

of Broughton House, Kirkcudbright, is also discussed.

In between, Zeiske and Sacramento offer cultural audits speculating on the transferability of the ‘Town is the Venue’ model to towns

Mountain Time Human Time

in Germany, South Africa, and Portugal, as well as a generous, if

Hamish Fulton with essays by Jay Griffiths and Jim Crumley

Hornel: The Life and Work of

particularly significant. It is thoughtfully illustrated with a wide array

somewhat controversial, theory of ‘shadow curating’ in contemporary

Edizioni Charta 2010

Edward Atkinson Hornel

of Hornel’s works and those by other Glasgow Boys reproduced to

art practices.

Paperback £23.50

Bill Smith

accompany the text. This is an extremely readable and informative

Atelier Books 2010

work that leaves one with a far deeper understanding of a remarkable

a working model at Deveron Arts (by Zeiske and Sacramento), ‘shadow

Since the late 1960s London/Kent-based artist Hamish Fulton has

Hardback £20

artist, and also a better grasp of the dynamics within the wider

curating’ extends the way in which (in politics) Shadow Ministers keep

been recontextualising the definitions of sculpture and photography

Glasgow Boys group and the influences that led them to create such

a check on the current government and balance of power. Approached

through a framework of dematerialising landscape art by means

progressive work. (Helen Dyson)

as friendly agonism rather than an overthrow of power, the working

of walking. Self-identifying as a ‘walking artist’, Fulton has been

potential for curators and shadow curators is especially pertinent to

physically and spiritually expanding his experience of art beyond

curators living in remote geographical locations, working in public

the production of objects, and Scotland’s own terrain has been a

spaces and with community groups. Creating a constant feedback

repeated subject of inquiry.

system of critical thought in the precarious process of curatorial

activity, the shadow curator theory remains speculative at best, at least

art’, Fulton has produced a tangible book about his epic 21 day and

until its adoption by a cross-section of galleries and organisations.

20 night walk through the Cairngorms region of Scotland. Interacting

Edward Hornel was a key member of the Glasgow Boys group. He is

with the landscape without interfering with the precarious world of

remembered particularly for his friendship with fellow Glasgow Boy

As a central idea in Sacramento’s PhD thesis and adopted as

The book explains how shadow curating works, running

51

As the only monograph dedicated to Hornel, this book is

Often stating ‘If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of

Scottish Art News 52

residency and he advocates the persistence of a self-conscious ‘Scottish’ art and a debate on the character of the national visual art, highlighting visiting artists who made an impact. In this context, one particularly interesting exemplification of Richardson’s focus upon artists redefining the typologies of Scottish landscape is artist John Latham’s redesignation of the West Lothian shale, Monumental Process Sculptures – Niddrie Woman and Five Sisters (1975-76). As part of the ‘Artist Placement Group’ which placed artists within industrial, governmental and administrative settings, Latham’s ‘Placement’ Alex Reid (far left) in France around 1890 with (from left to right) Arthur Heseltine, Roderic O’Conor, James Guthrie Mme Heseltine and John Lavery, c.1890, Private Collection

enabled him to work as a self-styled ‘Incidental Person’ alongside civil servants at the Scottish Office’s Development Agency. There he made a series of proposals for the huge spoil heaps, or ‘bings’, of Scottish Art since 1960

coal and red shale waste in the Mid and West Lothian region. He had

Van Gogh’s Twin

art historical and biographical significance of Vincent’s painting of his

Historical Reflections and Contemporary Overviews

been invited to undertake a feasibility study to consider the problem

The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid, 1854-1928

Scots doppelganger.

Craig Richardson

of derelict land, and his report recommended the preservation of

Frances Fowle

Ashgate Publishing Limited 2011

five of the bing sites as monuments, each of which possessed its

National Galleries of Scotland 2010

that alone would have secured a footnote mention for him in the

Hardback £65

own highly interesting form as an alternative to costly and almost

Hardback £19.95

history of modern art, but Frances Fowle’s highly informative survey

impossible removal – a reversal of prevalent conventional attitudes to

Alexander Reid was Van Gogh’s only British sitter and

of his interesting life and successful career reveals that Reid was an

The focus of Craig Richardson’s ‘Historical Reflections and

such mountains of waste. Given the ubiquity of depictions of the land

I consider the dealer stronger in him (Reid) than the artist, though there be

important influential figure in his own right within early European

Contemporary Overviews’ of Scottish art since 1960 is the restoration

and sea in Scottish art, it is refreshing to see the subject given formal,

a battle in his conscience concerning this.

modernism. In her introduction to this beautifully designed, lucidly

of pre-eminent artworks from 1968-78. This period of late modern

political, poetic and conceptual consideration.

written and copiously illustrated publication, the author observes

Scottish art, argues the author (Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria

I can still vividly recall going to the National Gallery in Edinburgh as a

that Reid, as a dealer, was fortunate to ‘have been born in the right

University), has suffered from institutional oversight and a lack of

framing Scottish art at the end of the twentieth century and the

kid and being transfixed by a painting which seemed to be a swirling

place at the right time.’ Yet still more crucially, he also possessed the

scholarly research to such an extent that an appreciative readership

beginning of the new century, which he identifies as critical contestation

mass of staccato orange and green brushstrokes out of which a pair

three ‘elements’ necessary to become a hugely successful art dealer

has been misinformed and significant omissions made. These

and commercially-driven international ‘delivery’. Advocating

of riveting eyes stared back at me hypnotically. Nothing else in the

– ‘a discerning eye; access to a steady supply of good quality art at

omissions, he explains, are ‘often telling us something’ as well as

outspoken critical independence, he draws attention to important

gallery held my attention as this picture. I was further enthralled by

a reasonable price; and a group of prosperous clients’ – especially

having had a subsequent impact on the visual arts. Forming the crux

curatorial activity with particular emphasis on Transmission Gallery

the accompanying label which stated that it was a self portrait by

as he was ‘the Scottish arbiter of taste’ for the Glasgow merchant

of his research, his hope is that this publication will go some way

(Glasgow) and its committee as well as the importance of national and

my boyhood artist hero – Vincent van Gogh. Alas, that particular

princes, like William Burrell. Through his personal enthusiasm and

towards filling these gaps and establishing a firmer recognition of the

international networking. The author goes on to look at the effects of

experience now can no longer be had, as the painting was moved to

commercial determination Reid became the major promoter of early

way in which this artwork has contributed to the solid foundations of

Scottish devolution on the visual arts while outlining the multitude of

Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow after it was found that I -along

modern painting in Britain. A committed international modernist

the visual arts in Scotland.

developments that led to the success of artists in the 1990s, focusing on,

with thousands of others – had not been gazing on the face of the

he tirelessly worked the growing net work of artists, dealers and

among others, artists Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland.

tragic martyr of modern art, but at his erstwhile Paris flatmate and

collectors between Glasgow, London and Paris, while also opening

National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) and the state of the arts

Throughout, Richardson stresses the lack of sustained

uncanny double – Alexander Reid. Yet despite the re-attribution,

up the British market to non-European work such as Japanese prints.

in Scotland at this time – a ‘desultory scene’ (bar a few exceptions)

art criticism, underlining the importance of literary values in visual

this endlessly intriguing portrait continues to fascinate me. Now

As with his Continental counterparts – Vollard and Kahnweiler-Reid

for artists with no specialised art magazines, very few resources

art. His chronologically constructed chapters attempt to disturb the

as I look at a reproduction of this painting on the cover of Frances

supported and promoted the avant garde movement at the turn of

or agencies for the promotion of visual arts, and no subsidised

accepted chronology by ‘resurfacing’ key artworks and exhibitions.

Fowle’s splendid biography of the renowned Glasgow art dealer, I

the twentieth century, both by one person shows and with group

studios. It follows through to a brighter conclusion with the Scottish

As Richardson states, the few previous published histories of late

am suddenly reminded of the opening of Roland Barthes’ Camera

exhibitions for The Glasgow Boys, The Scottish Colourists and The

representation at the 2003 Venice Biennale Zenomap, for which 200

modern and contemporary Scottish art, with some exceptions have

Lucida when, while examining a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest

French Impressionists. The individual artists he particularly admired

artists were considered for – ‘an inspiring growth in Scottish visual

become ‘mythologised, politically oriented with often aligned through

brother he exclaimed ‘I am looking at the eyes that looked at the

and successfully promoted included Whistler and Degas. Ironically

arts’. Richardson looks at the early years of the SNGMA, before

inaccurate précis’. Richardson’s project seeks to deconstruct and

Emperor.’ I too sense that, through the evocative power of this

however – possibly because they were so similar in character, as

looking in detail at the work of William Turnbull, Ian Hamilton Finlay,

reinvigorate this issue, bringing into critical view artworks which have

portrait, I am again brought into the proximity of historical and artistic

well as appearance, and inevitably fell out with each other – Reid

Mark Boyle and Bruce McLean, artists who were expanding critical

had minimal visibility despite their high relevance for aiding our historical

greatness. Somehow I am magically transported by the image’s

personally never rated the art of Van Gogh. Yet despite that rift,

discourse in their practice and thus directing British art towards a

understanding. This publication demonstrates scope for further debate,

aura into the presence of the Dutch master, especially through the

thankfully we still have their fascinating portrait which they both

‘gentle revolution’.

research and practice within the subject, instigating new possibilities

Scottish connection between Reid and Van Gogh. Furthermore, with

– the artist and the dealer – created together in Paris during that

The book begins in 1960 with the opening of the Scottish

The last two chapters look at the central developments

– Theo van Gogh to his brother, Vincent

for the future of the visual arts in Scotland. It is evident throughout that

the careful and painstaking research which has clearly gone into

summer of 1887.

determination is an anathema to Scottish artists’). For the author,

Scottish art’s future is the author’s abiding interest, dependent of course

her richly rewarding labour of love, Frances Fowle has provided an

(Bill Hare is a writer, curator and teacher based in Edinburgh)

‘Scottish artist’ is not a geographic definition and does not spell

upon a commitment to sustained invention.

appropriate narrative context in which to appreciate more fully the

Richardson promotes an ‘inclusive Scottish art’ (‘over-

53

Scottish Art News 54

with an uncompromising aesthetic standard: something to measure

of this pivotal period and out of the transparency of

up to on my own terms, if I could.

these stripped-down, watercolour-like paintings that

John eventually evolved the harder-edged, more opaque,

Ian Collins is wide-ranging in relating the artist’s life to his

work. Brought up in north-east Scotland, John McLean read English

and more intensely saturated colour-shapes resting

– not fine art – at St.Andrews University in the 1950s, went on to the

on coloured fields that now characterise his current

Courtauld Institute, and stayed in London to establish himself as an

painting. In turn, however, the best of these paintings,

artist. By not having gone through conventional art education, he

lucid and straightforward in a new way – particularly

was self-directed and formed his direction under his own sensibility,

those from the mid-1990s – establish a level of facility,

through his own eyes, without anyone else interposing their ideas

invention and renewal that few other contemporary

or ideologies. He quickly formed professional attachments within

painters have come anywhere near to. This period

the small, informal London art scene of the 1960s (even for a period

onwards is well represented in the book, and some of the

contributing reviews to The Guardian), and made further friendships

paintings reproduced take my eye so much by surprise

in North America in the 1970s and 1980s. John’s painting is well

that I wish I could see them in actuality. (Artists’ best

John McLean

known, but there’s also his body of work as a sculptor, printmaker

work almost invariably disappears into private and

Ian Collins

and, of course, in stained glass. Ian Collins’ account is rich, anecdotal

corporate collections, long before museum committees

Lund Humphries

and unencumbered by theory-clogged art-speak. Throughout his

make decisions.)

Hardback £35

narrative John’s human warmth is very much conveyed, for instance

After their first meeting in New York in 1972

by a chapter devoted to the handmade cards, drawings and letters

John exchanged letters over many years with the critic,

Why would a contemporary Scottish abstract painter be

he sends a wide range of acquaintances – among them John

Clement Greenberg. There are a couple of quotes from

commissioned to design stained glass windows as part of the recent

Elderfield (now chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at

Greenberg’s letters in the book, from which I’m surprised to learn that

restoration of Walpole’s fanciful gothic Strawberry Hill? For the artist,

the Museum of Modern Art in New York) who in turn contributes

on a visit to Edinburgh in 1977, Greenberg agreed to go and see John’s

John McLean – who was the first choice of the architects involved

a piece about his own John McLean watercolour. A considerable

father, the painter Talbert McLean, in Arbroath. (Greenberg thought

– the answer probably goes back at least 30 years. When I first met

number of John’s fellow-artists, most of them long-time colleagues,

Talbert ‘had and was having a better life than Rothko had ever known,

John, in 1978, he had just returned to London from a visit to the south

have also contributed pieces about him. These perhaps give a more

let alone Pollock’.) How much of this correspondence survives, either

of France – in particular Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. It

vivid sense of the man and his art than anything else. Some of them

in the Greenberg estate or among John’s papers, I don’t know. But I do

would be difficult for anyone not to be profoundly affected by the

are fine pieces of writing, particularly

hope someone one day will take the trouble to find out (bear in mind

radiant light and colour of Matisse’s stained glass, as I imagine John

by his contemporary Mali Morris.

that 50 years went by after the death of Henri Matisse until Hilary

must have been.

John himself has contributed one

Spurling took the trouble to reconstruct the artist’s biography from his

or two articulate and intelligent

letters).

In fact Ian Collins’ recent book on John McLean describes

other stained glass designs, this time for windows in Norwich

reminiscences of his own.

Cathedral (an ambitious project, still under way at the time of

essence of well-being’, Peter

writing). At 71, John’s achievement is substantial, yet so far not

to be made of this book, it’s that it

Matthiessen once wrote and to

much documented. It goes beyond Scottish art – he is one of a

scants the work of the late 1970s

me it’s clear that this has always

handful of artists who have kept abstract painting at a high level,

and shows almost nothing of the ten

been John McLean’s particular

however marginalised by contemporary art’s realm of spectacle and

years from 1978 to 1987. For it was

intuition too. I don’t think this

entertainment. Ian Collins’ monograph is therefore every bit as due as

the spareness, directness and beauty

book will be the last word on John

it is overdue.

of these paintings of the late 1970s

McLean, because there is more to

When I was a student I visited John in London several

that established John’s reputation.

be said about that period of British

times. He’d just given up his Stockwell Depot studio (where soot

They have an open-ended feeling,

art that he has been part of. But it

Strawberry Hill

would fall from the rafters when planes flew overhead) and was

seeming to lay bare the mechanisms

is a welcome beginning.

268 Waldegrave Road, Twickenham TW1 4ST

working in a clean, well-lit room in his house in Franconia Road in

of painting itself, and in doing so

(Alan Shipway is a painter living and

Tel: 020 8744 1241

Clapham. He was more than generous with his time and would

contributed something very particular

working in Edinburgh)

www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk

always invite me to look at what he was working on. I liked his

not only to British painting but to art

situation. It seemed to me right away that he was the author of his

as a whole. All ambitious art has this

own milieu. His paintings were clear, lucid and straightforward. They

quality of open-endedness – of visibly

were better than, and quite apart from, any other abstract painting

containing within itself its own means

I knew of in London at the time and provided me, I knew even then,

and its own possibilities. It was out

55

If there is any criticism

‘Simplicity is the whole

OPPOSITE John Mclean’s stained glass replaces Horace Walpole’s saints which were lost after an explosion at the Hounslow Gunpowder Factory in 1772.

Strawberry Hill Trust/Richard Holttum LEFT John Mclean, Singet, Rhumet, 2007 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy Poussin Gallery, London

FROM TOP John Mclean, Untitled, 1976 Acrylic on canvas

Dancer, 2004 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy Poussin Gallery, London

Open: 2 April – 2 November inclusive (2011) Saturday, Sunday: 12–4.20pm (last admission) Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: 2–4.20pm (last admission) Thursday, Friday: Closed Admission: £8.00/£7.25 Scottish Art News 56

Review Childish Things:

the pervasive and insidious effect of kitsch on contemporary art

absorbing and provocative exhibition:

Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Robert Gober, Susan Hiller,

and culture is something which still rings true for me. I only have to

Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy

pass a Disney toy store with all its garish wares to hear Greenberg’s

of strangeness, full of curious many-coloured toys which change their

The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

words echoing in my head – ‘kitsch is the epitome of all that is

appearance, which, like little children, we sometimes break to see

(19 November 2010 – 23 January 2011)

spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing

how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realise they are

Curated by Professor David Hopkins, The University of Glasgow

of its customers except their money – not even of their time.’ Yet all

empty.’

‘To live in a world as if in an immense museum

that being said there were on the other hand, a number of things

Accompanying catalogue:

about this exhibition which did intrigue and attract me. For a start,

as found in the iconography of playthings very much echoes the

Childish Things

because of my evangelical upbringing, I was drawn to the biblical

curatorial selection and interpretive approach taken by Hopkins for

David Hopkins

title; furthermore, while I usually loath the banal work of Jeff Koons, I

his exhibition. As you might expect from the leading authority on

The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

love the anarchic films of Paul McCarthy; but most of all, I have had a

Dada and Surrealism this exhibition finds there is infinitely more

£14.95

long standing admiration for the critical writings of the curator, David

of Sigmund Freud than St Paul in our attitudes to ‘childish things’

Hopkins, and greatly enjoyed his previous curated exhibition in 2006

which, contrary to biblical verse, can never be fully put away but

at the Fruitmarket – Dada’s Boys: Identity and Play in Contemporary Art.

continues to linger in our personal memories and haunt the collective

Childish Things, with its focus on the theme of childhood and the role

unconscious. In his critical commentaries Hopkins argues that the

of toys in British and American art between 1983-2008, seemed to be

works in his exhibition can be divided broadly into two categories.

a further visit by Hopkins to an area of recent art practice in which he

One group of artists appear to draw inspiration mainly from their own

has taken a particular critical interest.

personal childhood experiences; while the art of the others is viewed

more as a response to the processes of socialisation which American

Suffer the Little Children

While I am still in a confessional frame of mind I also

These ‘dark poetics’ of childhood evoked by de Chirico

have to admit that I found what David Hopkins had to say about

and British children have been subjected to over the last quarter of a

his exhibition in his extremely illuminating essay for the catalogue

century or so.

Maybe I should put my cards on the table right from the start. When

rather more inspiring than some of the work in the exhibition itself.

I read the Fruitmarket Gallery’s media release for Childish Things I was

That of course is one of the dangers of any thematic exhibition where

seems to be predominately female artists, with the two prominent

not immediately full of excited anticipation and expectation. The list

the work on display can sometimes feel as though it is being used

examples being Louise Bourgeois and Helen Chadwick. Bourgeois’

of selected names for the exhibition contained some artists whose

to illustrate the curatorial theme rather than the other way around.

work, with its eponymous title of Oedipus, is as Freudian as you

work has never particularly appealed to me; and, disappointedly

I should however, also report that the overall experience of Childish

can get and consists of a vitrine in which that mythic incestuous

omitted for a Scottish art historian like me, Eduardo Paolozzi, who

Things had a stimulating and provocative impact on my intellectual

tale is played out in the diminutive form of hand-stitched pink dolls

uses the toy in his art in a distinctive and inventive way. Yet the

and emotional sensibilities when I overcame my initial prejudicial

or puppets. This theatricality, which is characteristic of much of

main reason for my lack of initial enthusiasm lies with me as I have

reservations and went to see it. In fact a quote from the catalogue

Bourgeois’ work, is appropriate with its obvious links to Sophocles’

to admit that I am one of that rare breed who is an unashamed

essay by that great precursor to Surrealism, Giorgio de Chirico very

play. Furthermore, through Oedipus the artist also psychologically

modernist. The dire warning of Clement Greenberg concerning

much struck a chord with my reactions as I walked through this

delves back into the history of her own childhood sexual yearnings

Whether there is a gender issue here or not the first group

and traumas which stimulate the Freudian analyst in Hopkins to speculate –‘are we viewing here some playing-out of her own incestuous fantasies regarding her father?’ If Bourgeois uses the universality of Greek myth as a backdrop for her autobiographical narrative, Chadwick, in her complex multifaceted installation Ego Geometria Sum, goes further by literally impressing the personal iconography associated with her childhood on to the Platonic eternal forms of geometrically shaped objects. In the context of this exhibition these pieces appear to take on the role of a child’s set of wooden play blocks which can be endlessly rearranged to give varied accounts of the artist’s real and imagined early life in more or less the OPPOSITE Louise Bourgeois, Oedipus, 2003 Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph: Christopher Burke FROM TOP Jeff Koons, Bear and Policeman, 1988 Helen Chadwick,The Juggler’s Table, c.1983 Estate of Helen Chadwick, Henry Moore Institute/Leeds Museums and Galleries

57

same way in which all our personal memories seem to operate.

Within the implied significance of the autobiographically

related work of artists like Bourgeois and Chadwick there is always an inner tension between individual choice and as Hopkins puts it ‘some abstract principle of destiny’. This metaphysical dialectic leads to his Scottish Art News 58

British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet

much as freedom.’ For the ancient Greeks, that controlling destiny over our

27 May – 21 August 2011

individual lives would be seen to emanate ultimately from the capricious

Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts/

will of the gods themselves; but in our contemporary secular age – where

Gallery of Modern Art / Tramway, Glasgow

no oracle at Delphi can be consulted – we must look to other agencies to

www.britishartshow.co.uk/venues/glasgow

try to discern who is ruling our personal development. Now our destiny is no longer in our stars, nor even in our genes, but in the signs of our times.

By now a well-established fixture in the contemporary art calendar,

And here is where the work of Hopkins’ second group of selected artists

the bi-decadal British Art Show returns to Glasgow for the first

comes to the fore – with Jeff Koons right up front. For it is Koons, more

time in 21 years. Touted by Adrian Searle as the ‘Best British Art

than any other, who demonstrates the newly prescribed role of the post-

Show, yet’, the seventh incarnation of this peripatetic exhibition

modern cultural practitioner as succinctly defined by Hal Foster – ‘the artist

initiated proceedings in Nottingham in October last year, going

becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects.’ Those

on to the Hayward Gallery on London’s Southbank, and will finally

signs are not to be discerned in the heavens; but for an artist like Koons, are

be transported to Plymouth after spending three months spread

found in our ready made ersatz consumer culture-those very things which

across Glasgow’s museums. Two years in the making, exhibition

we in the capitalist west have become all too familiar with since our earliest

curators Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feurvre coordinated the mammoth

childhoods.

task of selecting artists whose work best represents the pick of

contemporary British artistic talent. Careful to avoid merely surveying

Yet again Freud is the dominant presence operating in the

work of Hopkins’ second group of artists; yet this time it is not his theory

or disseminating the last five years of artistic production via trends

of the Oedipus Complex that holds sway but that of the Uncanny. In his

or movements, both Morton and Le Feuvre’s conscious endeavour to

profoundly influential essay Freud pointed out that what unsettles us most

produce and curate an ‘exhibition’ is evident in the subtle threads of

is that lurking sense of dread which arises from the fact that the uncanny is

association that link the works together.

both simultaneously strange and familiar – or, using the German derivation-

heimlich (homely). Thus it is little wonder that our seemingly comforting

the work is assembled under the suffix – In the Days of the Comet – a

cuddly playthings can quickly turn into the stuff of nightmares. Certainly

title appropriated from H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel of the same

Koons achieves this disturbing effect with his work Bear and Policeman. Here

name. Wells’s comet acts as the metaphorical umbrella under which

his folksy Disney-type wood carved sculpture is swelled to a gigantic scale

exhibited artworks can be understood to ponder such themes as

and a sinister reversal of roles takes place, wherein the reassuring authority

the recording of time, historical recurrence, and the imagination of

of the law seems to be being seduced and overwhelmed by the lurking dark

parallel worlds.

forces of nature masked behind the bear’s genial grin. But for me the most

unsettling, and at the same time, most successful works in the exhibition

envisaged by Scottish artist Charles Avery and his ongoing Islanders

were the two video pieces – Susan Hillier’s multisensory orgy of Punch and

project, two works relating to which are displayed in BAS7. The

Judy’s unrelenting ritualistic violence – ironically entitled, An Entertainment,

narrator of Avery’s literary works ‘the Hunter’ and his would-be

and Paul McCarthy’s highly subversive take on The Sound of Music in which

sweetheart ‘Miss Miss’ are present in a large vitrine work, while a

that twentieth-century icon to ‘childhood innocence and family cohesion’

large-scale drawing depicts the inhabitants and imagined urban

is literally turned on its head and made to tell its fairy tale story backwards.

landscape of Avery’s island. As a location for Avery’s thoughts and

With Julie Andrews and all the Trapps hanging bat-like from the top of

ideas to take root, ‘The Island’ acts as the imaginary plane from which

the picture, making the most weirdly alien noises imaginable, there are no

the artist operates.

happy endings here.

Throughout Childish Things Hopkins feels that all his selected

altermodernism?) chimes with Nathaniel Mellor’s video project

artists draw our attention and concern to the way the idea of childhood

Ourhouse produced for BAS7, chapters of which are being screened

and play is subjected to adult metaphysical beliefs and social practices – a

sequentially over the run of the exhibition with chapter 4 previewing

process to which he gives the punning term ‘adulteration’. Thus for Hopkins,

at Glasgow’s CCA. The central narrative of Mellors’s Ourhouse

‘we project onto children (including, presumably our own remembered

focuses on a fictional bohemian family and the absurd Pythonesque

childhood) our anxieties. They project back at us what we lack.’ From this

events that ensue in reaction to the arrival of a male figure known

traumatic situation our artists create what the Godfather of Surrealism,

only as ‘The Object’. As an accompaniment to this, Mellor exhibits

André Breton, aptly called ‘tragic toys for adults’ which present to us the

an installation guaranteed to rouse revulsion. In the form of an

seeming opportunity to gain entry to the heavenly realm of childhood

animatronic head endlessly expelling sputum into a bucket, expulsion

innocence and spiritual purity only to find a soulless domain full of

and reintegration of the mucus-like substance is repeated to form an

suppressed, or overt, ‘dark and aggressive fantasies’.

absurdist cycle of endless vomiting.

Bill Hare is a writer, curator and teacher based in Edinburgh.

59

Duncan Campbell, Bernadette (Film Stills), 2008 Courtesy Hotel Gallery, London

challenging observation that ‘these toys end up being tokens of control as

Diverse as the concerns of the 39 exhibiting artists are,

Immediately this calls up the imaginary universe

Such fantastical surrealism (or should it be called

PREVIEW 2011

Comparatively cyclical but otherwise functional, in

contrast to Mellors’s farcical installation, is Christian Marclay’s Scottish Art News 60

Clock – another video work to be screened alongside Mellor’s at the CCA. Marclay’s 24 hour-long film acts as an elaborate timepiece

Alasdair Gray May in White Bodice, 2010 Courtesy the artist and Sorcha Dallas

The substantial presence of Scottish born, based,

and educated artists included in BAS7 supports the exhibition’s

edited from thousands of film and television fragments of clock faces,

presence in Glasgow – a city moreover recognised as the second

watches, exclamations of and character reaction to the time of day.

home of contemporary British art outside of London. Among those

Synchronised to local time, Marclay’s artwork is a masterpiece of

accompanying Charles Avery and Duncan Campbell are Karla Black

seamless juxtapositions; film plots, dialogue and music are expertly

(also representing Scotland in the Venice Biennale this year), Luke

montaged and layered, building up to hourly crescendos marking the

Fowler, Michael Fullerton, Mick Peter and Alasdair Gray. Glasgow’s

passage of another 60 minutes. Time is easily lost sitting in front of

staging of BAS7 will boast a number of artworks previously unseen in

Marclay’s Clock, a work which not only invites a meditation on time

London and Nottingham; Charles Avery will unveil a new large scale

itself but also the power of film, video and even entertainment to

drawing, while the body and head of Brian Griffith’s giant tent-like

captivate and manipulate an audience.

construction of a bear will be displayed as one for the first time. In

addition Luke Fowler’s Composition for Flutter Screen will be shown at

The use of media footage is central to Duncan Campbell’s

documentary biography of Northern Irish activist Bernadette Devlin,

Tramway, and the Otolith Group’s Hydra Decapita alongside Episode 4

who in 1969 became the UK’s youngest MP at the age of 21. Dublin

of Mellors’s Ourhouse will be shown at the CCA.

born and Glasgow based, Duncan Campbell edits together archival

sources and found footage, overlaid with voiceover scripted by the

Alasdair Gray’s heraldically coloured paintings of family and

artist. Engaged with a moment from recent political history, Campbell

friends derived from drawings produced years before their painted

critiques the methods by which Devlin as a historical figure has

counterparts, depend on the moment and circumstance of their

been presented and manipulated in the media. Made ever more

creation. In a similar turn, this BAS7 in Glasgow is a product of

prescient owing to the recent car bomb murder of PC Ronan Kerr and

evolution over time and in response to the circumstances of its

resurgence of anxieties in Northern Ireland, Campbell’s work raises

location. As harbinger of change therefore, the Comet once again

concerns that relate to our contemporary political moment with the

encapsulates this exhibition as an evolving and developing event,

endurance of sectarianism in Ireland as well as Scotland in more

moving, changing and adapting over the year of its showing.

As work that speaks very much to the city of Glasgow,

recent years.

Emma Baker has just completed an internship at Charles Avery, Untitled (Miss Miss finally gives in by the tree where Aeaen sought to bamboozle the One-Armed Snake by attaching himself to the tree to make himself a larger thing), 2010 Mixed media. Courtesy Pilar Corrias Gallery and doggerfisher Installation view in British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery, London Photo: Kieron McCarron

The Fleming Collection.

Centre for Contemporary Arts 350 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow G2 3JD Tel: 0141 352 4900 www.cca-glasgow.com Open: Tuesday – Sunday 11am–5pm, Admission free Gallery of Modern Art Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, Lanarkshire G1 3AH Tel: 0141 287 3050 www.glasgowmuseums.com Open: Tuesday – Sunday 11am–5pm, Admission free Tramway 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, Lanarkshire G41 2PE Tel: 0845 330 3501 www.tramway.org Open: Tuesday – Sunday 11am–5pm, Admission free For full details of the programme of performances, screenings, artist’s talks, guided tours of the exhibition and other events around Glasgow for BAS7, visit www.britishartshow.co.uk

61

ABOVE FROM TOP Michael Fullerton Catherine Graham, 2008; Tatiana Romanov, 2008 Courtesy the artist and Carl Freedman Gallery Alasdair Gray Andrew Gray Aged 7 and Inge’s Patchwork Quilt, 2009 Courtesy the artist and Sorcha Dallas Luke Fowler A Grammar For Listening Part 1, 2009 In collaboration with Lee Paterson © Luke Fowler and Lee Paterson Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Scottish Art News 62

The Pre-Raphaelites: Scottish Connections & Collections

Scottish Art 1650-2010: Work from the City’s Collection

7 July – 10 September 2011

until 10 July 2011

Lamb Gallery

City Art Centre, 2 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DE

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of

Tel: 0131 529 3993

Dundee 13 Perth Road, Dundee DD1 4HT

www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk

Tel: 0138 238 5330 http://www.dundee.ac.uk/museum/exhibitions/lamb.htm

This summer the City Art Centre showcases over 350 years of Scottish art featuring a large selection of paintings, watercolours,

Formed in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was responsible for

drawings, photographs, prints and sculptures all drawn from

some of the most striking and enduring images of Victorian British

their own extensive fine art collection and chronologically

Art. The original founders, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett

LEFT Frederick Sandys The White Mayde of Avenel 1902, pastel on paper © University of Dundee Museum Services

Millais and William Holman Hunt, were soon joined by other artists who shared their belief in a return to the vivid colours and detailed compositions of Italian painting before Raphael, rejecting the more

BELOW Sir Joseph Noel Paton The Dowie Dens o’ Yarrow 1860, oil on canvas © University of Dundee Museum Services

mannered, classical-based art practised by the establishment of the day. For several decades after the break-up of the original brotherhood, many English painters (such as Frederick Sandys and

displayed over five floors.

The early paintings dating from the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries are essentially a miscellany of portraits of eminent Edinburgh citizens by artists such as David Scougall and Sir Henry Raeburn. Several topographical views of the Scottish capital will also be on display.

The nineteenth century was marked by the foundation

John William Waterhouse) pursued the Pre-Raphaelite style, but

of the Royal Scottish Academy and was a period of intense artistic

what influence did the movement have on Scottish artists?

activity in Scotland. History painting was dominated by William Allan

who celebrated Scottish history in paintings such as the Signing of

From 7-10 July, the University of Dundee in collaboration

with the Scottish Word & Image Group will be hosting a major

the National Covenant in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Towards the end of the

interdisciplinary conference devoted to the Pre-Raphaelites. The

century, the Glasgow Boys drew their inspiration from everyday

conference, entitled wildering phantasies after a quotation which

subjects, as seen in Crawhall’s Piebald Driving. At the same time,

accompanies Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Dante’s Dream on the

William McTaggart occupied a dominant role in the painting of

Day of the Death of Beatrice in the McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery

landscapes with his impressionistic seascapes.

& Museum, will feature a fascinating range of speakers from across

the globe. The plenary lectures will be given by the eminent William

twentieth century saw the emergence of the Scottish Colourists and

Morris scholar Peter Faulkner and acclaimed literary critic Professor

Fergusson’s Blue Lamp illustrates the way in which the Colourists

Leonee Ormond. As part of the conference programme there will

were influenced by contemporary French art and shared their interest

be an evening reception at the McManus and a live performance

in the expressive power of colour. Gillies, Maxwell and Redpath, who

of Vaughan Williams’ The House of Life, a six-song cycle based on

were among the most eminent artists of the following generation,

poems by D G Rossetti.

mainly painted still lifes and landscapes.

To accompany the conference, the University’s

Moving through the exhibition, the early years of the

The growing internationalism which characterised the

Museum Services are staging an exhibition exploring some of the

post-war period made contemporary American art more accessible

Pre-Raphaelites’ Scottish connections, particularly Millais, who

to Scottish artists. Alan Davie was particularly influenced by

spent many years in Perth, the birthplace of his wife Effie Gray.

American abstract expressionism while his contemporary Eduardo

They married in 1855, shortly after Gray’s family had her first,

from the Paton archive recently acquired by Fife Council Museums,

Paolozzi was recognised as one of the founders of pop art. In the

unconsummated marriage to the art critic John Ruskin (a key early

never before shown in public. Various lesser-known works by the Pre-

1980s a group of four Glasgow artists, including Steven Campbell

supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites) annulled. Millais often used Effie

Raphaelites held in Scottish collections will also be included in the

and Peter Howson, burst on to the international art scene with

as a model, as he did with her sister Sophie, who married the Dundee

exhibition.

powerful figurative paintings. The exhibition concludes with several

jute baron James Caird. A self-portrait drawn by Millais and owned

works by Jock McFayden, Callum Innes, Christine Borland and Toby

by Caird is one of the rarities on show in the exhibition.

Matthew Jarron is Curator of Museum Services at the University of

Patterson, hinting at the diversity and originality of contemporary art.

Dundee and has responsibility for the University’s historic collections of art

This comprehensive survey of Scottish art also offers the chance to

and artefacts.

see some of the City Art Centre’s recent acquisitions.

born Joseph Noel Paton, whose love of myth, legend and historical

For further information about the exhibition, contact

Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Pierre Mendès France University in

subjects was manifested in bold, symbolic paintings which had all

museum@dundee.ac.uk and to attend the conference, contact

Grenoble and is a researcher in British studies. She is a member of the

the intensity and colour of the Pre-Raphaelites, though still drawing

j.a.george@dundee.ac.uk

French Society for Scottish Studies.

be a major focus of the exhibition, including his diploma work from

Open: Monday – Friday 9.30am–8pm, Saturday 10.30am–4.30pm

Open: Monday – Friday 10 am–5pm, Sunday 12pm–5pm

the Royal Scottish Academy and a number of drawings and sketches

Sunday: Closed. Admission Free

Admission Free

Although the Pre-Raphaelites were essentially an English

art movement, a number of contemporary Scottish artists were

FROM TOP Sir William Allan Signing of the National Covenant in Greyfriars Churchyard, 1893 Oil, 81.5x130.2 cm City Art Centre Joseph Crawhall Piebald Driving Gouache on linen, 36.2x35 cm City Art Centre

producing work in a similar vein. Most notable was the Dunfermline-

strongly on the classical traditions they eschewed. Paton’s work will

63

Scottish Art News 64

LISTINGS ABERDEEN

Tel: 0131 529 3993

Royal Scottish Academy

7 September – 1 October

Roger Billcliffe Gallery

Tolbooth Art Centre

edinburghmuseums.org.uk

Muse

F.C.B. Cadell: Paintings and Works on Paper

Advanced Graphics/ Peacock

The Glasgow Style: Glasgow and

4 July – 9 January 2012

5 – 29 October

Printmakers Aberdeen

Designers, 1890-1930

Aberdeen Art Gallery Fusion: British Ceramics and Glass

Dovecot Studios

In Japan: Highlights of Academicians

16 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ

Throughout Summer

July 9 – 21 August

Until 3 March 2012

Siobhan Davies Dance

Practice in Contemporary Japan

Tel: 0131 558 1200

Michael Dunning: Collioure Paintings

James Faed Senior (1821-1911)

An Early Copy of Raphael’s Madonna

12 – 16 July

30 July – 18 September

scottish-gallery.co.uk

and Drawings

1 – 30 October

Della Sedia

Heirlooms

Resident: 11

November

High Street, Kirkcudbright DG6 4JL

Until 11 September

4 August – 4 September

8 October – 27 October

Talbot Rice Gallery

Peter Graham: New Paintings

Tel: 01557 331 556

Schoolhill AB10 1FQ

10 Infirmary Street EH1 1LT

RSA Open 2011

Anton Henning / Ragamala

Nichola Theakston

dumgal.gov.uk

Tel: 0122 452 3700

Tel: 0131 550 3660

12 November – 18 December

5 August – 22 October

December

aagm.co.uk

dovecotstudios.com

The Mound EH2 2EL

Beholder / Hume

134 Blythswood Street G2 4EL

Tel: 0131 225 6671

19 November – February 2012

Tel: 0141 332 4027

DUNDEE

Edinburgh Printmakers

royalscottishacademy.org

University of Edinburgh Old College

billcliffegallery.com

South Bridge EH8 9YL

Paul Furneaux: Mokuhanga The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery

Until 23 July

Scottish National Gallery

Tel: 0131 650 2210

and Museum

Lineage: Prints by Michael Craig-Martin,

Dürer’s Fame

trg.ed.ac.uk

Consider the Lilies: A Second Look

Ian Davenport and Julian Opie

9 June – 11 October

Until August

4 August – 3 September

The Queen: Art and Image

Albert Square DD1 1DA

The Writing on Your Wall: Jeremy Deller

25 June – 18 September

Tel: 0138 230 7200

Ruth Ewan, Alasdair Gray, Joanne

Elizabeth Blackadder

mcmanus.co.uk

Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan

2 July – 2 January 2012

Caledoniart Scotland’s Islands

PERTH

25 September – 1 October 5th Annual Caledoniart Christmas

The Fergusson Gallery

Exhibition

Movement, Light & Shadow

27 November – 4 December

Until 12 November

The Air Gallery, 32 Dover Street

British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet

Fergusson’s Early Oils

Mayfair W1S 4NE

Until 21 August

Until 12 November

www.caledoniart.com

GLASGOW

17 September – 29 October

The Mound EH2 2EL

Centre for Contemporary Arts /

Brilliance in Colour

Lamb Gallery

23 Union Street EH1 3LR

Tel: 0131 624 6200

Gallery of Modern Art / Tramway

Until 11 February 2012

The Pre-Raphaelites:

Tel: 0131 557 2479

nationalgalleries.org

britishartshow.co.uk

Marshall Place PH2 8NS

Scottish Collections & Connections

edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Hunterian Art Gallery

7 July – 10 September

LONDON

AUCTIONS

Tel: 01738 783 425

Bonhams

pkc.gov.uk/museums

The Scottish Sale

University of Dundee

The Fruitmarket Gallery

Tony Cragg

Breaking the Renaissance Code

Nethergate DD1 4HN

Ingrid Calame

30 July – 6 November

25 June – 4 October

Tel: 01382 385 330

4 August – 9 October

75 Belford Road EH4 3DR

Colour, Rhythm and Form:

dundee.ac.uk/museum

Bill Bollinger

Tel: 0131 624 6200

J D Fergusson and France

Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum

27 October – 7 January 2012

nationalgalleries.org

10 September – 8 January 2012

Paintings of Patricia Cain & Sam Cartman

82 Hillhead Street, University of Glasgow

24 September – 6 November

Lyon & Turnbull

EDINBURGH Bourne Fine Art

45 Market Street EH1 1DF

16 August – 1 September STIRLING

22 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JX Tel: 0131 225 2266 bonhams.com/scottishpictures

Tel: 0131 225 2383

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 2

G12 8QQ

Dumbarton Road FK8 2RQ

Scottish Contemporary

fruitmarket.co.uk

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Tel: 0141 330 5431

Tel: 0178 647 1917

25 August

4 August – 25 September

hunterian.gla.ac.uk

smithartgallery.demon.co.uk

33 Broughton Place, Edinburgh EH1 3RR

AROUND SCOTLAND

lyonandturnbull.com ART FAIRS

Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture 29 July – 10 September

Open Eye Gallery

The Scottish Colourist Series: F.C.B. Cadell

6 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ

Alan Davie, CBE HRSA

22 October – 18 March 2012

Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum

Tel: 0131 557 4050

24 June – 12 July

73 Belford Road EH4 3DS

Drawing (on) Riverside:

bournefineart.com

John Byrne, RSA

Tel: 0131 624 6200

An Exhibition by Patricia Cain

Kircudbright Town Hall

11 August – 6 September

nationalgalleries.org

Until 14 August

The Glasgow Boys

Tel: 0131 557 8844

City Art Centre

Ann Ross, RSW

Argyle Street G3 8AG

2 July – 29 August

Vault: A new contemporary fair for visual

Scottish Art 1650-2010

11 – 29 November

The Scottish Gallery

Tel: 0141 276 9599

Kirkcudbright DG6 4AA

art in Glasgow, 9 – 11 September

Until 10 July

34 Abercromby Place EH3 6QE

Elizabeth Blackadder: New Paintings

glasgowmuseums.com

Tel: 0155 733 1643

The Briggait, 141 Bridgegate

Precious Light: David Mach

Tel: 0131 557 1020 / 558 9872

5 August – 3 September

artiststown.org.uk

Glasgow G1 5HZ

30 July – 16 October

openeyegallery.co.uk

Fergusson’s Women: Paintings and

Tel: 0141 553 5890

Drawings

thebriggait.org.uk

2 Market Street EH1 1DE 65

Scottish Art News 66

NEWS FROM

THE FLEMING COLLECTION I am delighted to announce that on 10th June The Fleming-Wyfold

The existing gallery opened in 2002 and is visited by over 100,000

Art Foundation opened a new gallery space, located on the floor

members of the public each year. It will continue to act as ‘an

above The Fleming Collection gallery in Berkeley Street.

embassy for Scottish art’ in London, showing exhibitions drawn

from a wide range of private and national collections as well as our

This development is an important step for us to undertake

in our eleventh year. It has been made possible through two generous

own. The Scottish Summer Exhibition, the second year of our selling

donations covering half of the cost of the lease for five years. The

exhibition, includes an invited group of established and emerging

Foundation receives no public funding, but relies on grants from

artists and is the perfect opportunity for collectors to acquire works.

charitable foundations, corporate sponsorship and donations from

A percentage of all sales go towards supporting The Fleming-Wyfold

individuals to finance its activities.

Art Foundation, the charity that runs The Fleming Collection.

The new gallery allows us to show rotating displays of

Our autumn exhibition, John Burningham: An Illustrated

paintings from our permanent collection of Scottish art, comprising

Journey, celebrates the rich and varied career of one of Britain’s most

paintings from 1770 to the present day. The inaugural hang

distinguished and best-loved illustrators and includes Burningham’s

showcases a number of our key works including the two iconic

iconic London Transport posters, illustrations and working drawings

images of The Highland Clearances, Thomas Faed’s The Last of

for his children and adult books as well as those for Chitty Chitty

The Clan and John Watson Nicol’s Lochaber No More. A group of

Bang Bang by Ian Fleming, animated films, and previously unseen

paintings by the Glasgow Boys includes work by Lavery, Guthrie,

archival material.

Walton, Nairn and Kennedy as well as still life paintings by all four

Scottish Colourists, a number of works by Anne Redpath alongside

will continue to loan works to other museums and galleries and

her contemporaries John Maxwell and William Gillies, and other

has just lent a number of works to Dumfries House for two years

gems from the permanent collection.

including portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn and Sir David Wilkie and

In addition to our exhibition programme The Foundation

landscapes by John Knox, Horatio McCulloch and Sir D Y Cameron among others. Several of our Glasgow Boys will be on show this summer at Kirkcudbright Town Hall in an exhibition curated by Roger

Proud to support the new gallery at The Fleming Collection gallery support group

Billcliffe. The Foundation is lending three works, including a tapestry woven by Dovecot to the National Galleries of Scotland’s Elizabeth Blackadder retrospective celebrating her 80th birthday. In the autumn loans include Charles Lees’ Skaters on Duddingston Loch, which will

For installations, lighting, trans port , and storage d e d i c a t e d to t h e a r t i n d u s t r y and chosen by museums, galleries, public and private collectors of distinction.

be displayed in an exhibition of Sporting Life in redeveloped galleries

Photos: Dirk Vogel

of The Scottish National Portrait Gallery and two of our Cadells will be included in the Cadell show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 2, Edinburgh, curated by Alice Strang, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

We look forward to welcoming visitors to the new

gallery. For further information on how to support The Fleming Collection through individual and corporate giving please contact our Development Office.

Visitor Information 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Tel: 020 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30pm

Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art We wish to thank the following for supporting our exhibition programme: Founder Member: Fleming Family & Partners Ltd

For a quotation, please email: 67

info@gallerysupportgroup.com

Corporate Members: Berkeley Law Evercore Partners Limited

Eton College Flemings Hotel, Mayfair Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch Whisky James Hambro & Partners LLP RFIB Group Limited Ridgeway Partners LLP

Also: Patrons of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Friends of The Fleming Collection

Scottish Art News 68

THE FLEMING COLLECTION

THE FLEMING COLLECTION

John Burningham: An Illustrated Journey W. Barns-Graham: A Scottish Artist in St. Ives

Visitor Information: 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Tel: 020 7042 5730 | www.flemingcollection.com Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30pm | Admission Free 69

A Centenerary Exhibition in association with The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Scorpio Series No.1, 1995, acrylic on paper, 56x76 cm © Courtesy The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

10 January – 5 April 2012

Borka, the Adventures of a Goose with no Feathers by John Burningham Published by Tom Maschler (1963)

13 September – 22 December 2011

Visitor Information: 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Tel: 020 7042 5730 | www.flemingcollection.com Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30pm | Admission Free Scottish Art News 70

Enjoy Scottish Art with Fleming Collection Membership

Events 2011 F. C. B. Cadell, A Scottish Colourist: Talk

Jack Milroy Studio Visit

Membership entitles you to enjoy the gallery and our exhibitions to the full as well as free entry to the new First Floor Gallery for the Permanent Collection. You will receive invitations to special viewings and can shop for books and purchase tickets to lectures, tours and events at better value. You will also receive monthly news bulletins and Scottish Art News magazine.

The Two Roberts: Colquhoun and

and drinks reception at Portland Gallery

MacBryde evening lecture

Thursday 15 September, 6.30–7.30pm

Tuesday 20 September, 6–7.30pm

Monday 7 November, 6.30pm doors open,

Portland Gallery, 8 Bennet Street

Meeting place given with your ticket

7–8pm lecture

London SW1A 1RP

(Location: central London)

The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street,

Tickets: £15; Friends, Philanthropic Friends,

Tickets: £20; Friends, Philanthropic Friends,

London W1J 8DU

Corporate Members and Students £10;

Corporate Members and Students £15;

Tickets: £15; Friends, Philanthropic Friends,

Patrons free

Patrons free

Corporate Members and Students £10;

We rely on memberships and donations from our visitors and charitable foundations to help fund all our activities as The Fleming Collection receives no public funding.

Patrons free This exclusive talk and private view of the

Born in Glasgow in 1938, Jack Milroy

Following nearly twenty years of original

Scottish Colourist, F. C. B. Cadell will be an

trained at Scarborough School of Art and

research, this lecture is based on the book

opportunity to learn more about the artist

the University of London and has been

The Last Bohemians which tells the story

and view over 60 paintings from private

represented by Art First since 1996. Milroy

of two of the most colourful, talented

collections. Founded in 1984 by Tom Hewlett,

works with diverse materials. Alongside

and ultimately tragic artists of the mid-

Portland Gallery is one of London’s leading

illustrated books, he has used old tubes of

twentieth century. The author, Roger

art galleries dealing with Modern British

paint, paint brushes, stamps, maps, and

Bristow, painstakingly researched the lives

and Contemporary paintings. A particular

now, with his computer and a sophisticated

of these two companions, gathering first-

specialisation is the Scottish Colourist

Epson printer he makes archival inkjet prints.

hand information from many contemporary

F. C. B. Cadell, whose work is being exhibited

His virtuosic manipulations of imagery,

British artists such as Wilhelmina Barns-

at the gallery in September. To coincide with

either found or created photographically, are

Graham and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Bristow

the exhibition Hewlett’s book on Cadell will

subjected to a surgical use of the scalpel,

is a graduate of Kingston School of Art and

be relaunched with updated material and

resulting in cut paper and film constructions

has worked in book publishing for many

images and there will be an opportunity to

seen in recent exhibitions.

years as an art director.

buy signed copies of the new publication. If

This lecture has been kindly sponsored by

you would like a personalised copy please

which answers to an irrepressible sense of

contact The Fleming Collection before the

humour and a surrealist interest in the art of

12th September.

transformation, sabotage and chance, there

While there is a playful side

is also a serious formal investigation at work, and a darker preoccupation which underpins much of Milroy’s oeuvre.

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust.

To book tickets tel 020 7042 5730 or email: gallery@flemingcollection.com You can also book online: www.flemingcollection.com

The Fleming Collection is the only museum dedicated to showing Scottish art all year round. It provides Scottish museums and galleries with a platform to exhibit their paintings to a London audience as well as showcasing paintings from The Fleming Collection. The permanent collection comprises over 750 oils and watercolours from 1770 to the present day.

Friends enjoy free entry to the new First Floor Gallery for the Permanent Collection.

MEMBERSHIPS AND DONATIONS I would like to make a donation to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Registered Charity no. 1080197 £50 □ £100 □ £250 □ other ________ I WISH TO JOIN AS A MEMBER Single Friend £40 □ Joint Friends £60 □ Student £30 □ Single Philanthropic Friend £500 □ Joint Philanthropic Friends £800 □ Single Patron £1000 □ Joint Patrons

£2000 □

□ Tick here to receive your monthly bulletin by post instead of

email

Personal Details

Method of Payment

Names (incl. title):__________________________________________________

□Visa □Mastercard □Maestro □Cheque

Address:__________________________________________________________

Card No: _________ / _________ / _________ / _________

_________________________________________________________________

Expiry date _____ /_____ Security No _____

Telephone: ________________________Email: _____________________________

Please make cheques payable to Fleming Collection Ltd.

Gift Aid It □ I am eligible as a UK taxpayer and consent to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation claiming Gift Aid on all qualifying subscriptions and donations from the date of this declaration until I notify you otherwise. OR □ I am not eligible as a UK taxpayer/do not consent.

Please note that CAF cheques are accepted for donations and Patrons membership only, not for tickets or Friends membership, they must be made payable to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

Signature: ___________________________________Date: ________________ Jack Milroy’s studio

71

F.C .B Cadell, Interior, Summer, c.1927, oil, 63x76 cm

Gift Aid notes: 1. You must pay an amount of UK income tax and/or capital gains tax at least equal to the tax that The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation (FWAF) reclaim on your subscription and donations in the tax year (currently 25p for every £1). 2. If in the future your circumstances change and you are no longer a UK taxpayer you should cancel your declaration. 3. Please notify FWAF should you change your name or address. 4. You can cancel the Gift Aid declaration by notifying FWAF. 5. FWAF’s reference number for the HM Revenue and Customs is XR76701.

Scottish Art News 72

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Scottish Art News

ENTERTAIN YOUR CLIENTS IN EXQUISITE SURROUNDINGS ISSUE 12 AUTUMN 2009 £3

Sir Muirhead Bone Face of Scotland Martin Boyce The Discovery of Spain The Public Catalogue Foundation Edinburgh Art Festival

Issue 15 | Spring 2011

Issue 14 | Autumn 2010

Issue 13 | Spring 2010

Issue 12 | Autumn 2009

Issue 11 | Spring 2009

BOOK NOW TO HIRE THE GALLERY FOR Client Breakfasts, Evening Receptions and Dinners The new First Floor Gallery is now open offering greater floor space for conferences, dining and receptions

Issue 10 | Autumn 2008

73

Issue 9 | Spring 2008

Issue 8 | Autumn 2007

Issue 7 | Spring 2007

Issue 6 | Autumn 2006

THE FLEMING COLLECTION 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London W1J 8DU 020 7042 5784 │ gallery@flemingcollection.com │ www.flemingcollection.com

Five Centuries of Scottish Portraiture 29th July - 10th September

Adam De Colone Allan Ramsay David Martin Sir Henry Raeburn Sir John Watson Gordon Harrington Mann Sir William Oliphant Hutchison Sir William Gillies

BOURNE 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ 0131 5574050 www.bournefineart.com

David Allan 1744-1796 The Origin of Painting, oil on canvas, 27 x 20 in